• Adobe After Effects

  Working from design file – Animating along circular path

  Posted by John Sappo on December 12, 2014 at 5:36 pm

  Hi everyone,

  I’ve recently been given an Adobe Illustrator design file with specific design assets to be used for animated motion graphics.

  I’ve begun to tinker with animating the smaller spheres around the larger sphere. My techniques have included using a 3d orbit plugin, and expressions to get the smaller spheres to rotate around the larger sphere.

  These techniques although cool, do not work as expression math doesn’t maintain a true linking to the larger sphere that’s been illustrated, and I’m really not savvy enough to write the code to do so.

  Could you suggest the best way to control the animation of each sphere using the larger sphere path as the path the smaller spheres are ‘anchored’ too?

  Best.

  

  Michael Szalapski replied 11 years, 5 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  John Sappo

  December 12, 2014 at 9:14 pm

  Ha, yes -due to my mind not switching back into the second dimension as I wrote that.

  Circles all day.
• 

  Michael Szalapski

  December 19, 2014 at 3:42 pm

  I would put a null object at the center of the circle and then parent the smaller circles to it. Then, you can rotate the null and the little circles will rotate around the big circle!

  – The Great Szalam
  (The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

  No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

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