• Adobe After Effects

  Positioning and anchor points with imported compositions

  Posted by Judas Beast on December 27, 2006 at 1:50 pm

  First of all thanks guys for all your feedback – all a great help!

  I often create all the artwork for a project in illustrator or Photoshop with all the design elements saved to separate layers – so that I can import the artwork into AE as a composition, and then animate those layers individually.

  This is great because the imported file retains all positions of the original… complex illustrator designs can contain as many layer/elements as you want to prepare.

  For me the problems start when I want to transform the layers. For example, if you rotate a layer (some wheels on a car) it starts to orbit around the composition from the centre rather than rotate from the wheels centre.

  I know that you have to manually position the anchor point from within each layer – because AE sets the anchor point relating to the dimensions of the original illustrator comp. But when you do this everything loses its position and flies to the centre of the comp

  What I normally do is duplicate the imported AE comp and nest the duplicated comp inside the original comp. I then turn its opacity down to 50% and set it as the bottom layer as a guide so I can adjust the anchor points of all the art layers then re-position them by dragging over to the right part of the guide layer….

  THE QUESTION IS

  This is the way I do this, and was as usual, hoping there was some sort of short cut or more accurate way method.
  The real problem is (apart from it takes a long time) is when I work with a very precise graphic – I can

  Judas Beast replied 19 years, 7 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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