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AE links to wrong Illustrator layers
Hi all,
This problem has bothered me for a while now.. I’ve had enough and created an account specifically to see if any of you had an answer 🙂
My issue is this:
I work with illustrator files with a lot of layers, import them into AE and animate them. After reopening projects after a while (because i need to change something, or reuse a part of an animation for a new project) I find that often AE messes up the links to the different layers. So it links to the wrong layer. My animation get all jumbled up. It’s a pain in the ass to relink all the layers to the right one.
What could be the cause?
I’m on Catalina, macbook pro from 2015, using AE 2022 (18.4) and Illustrator 2022 (26), but this problem has been around for me for several previous versions of AE and illustrator. Am I forgetting any specs needed to look into this issue?
Now that I’m here: THANKS to the whole community for answering all these questions, for years now creative cow posts have provided me with all the answers I needed. Thanks to everyone, and to the big names like Dan Ebberts (and a couple of others I’m forgetting now) in particular.
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2 Replies
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Hi Maarten,
Something I realized from the ai to ae workflow is that if we have already animated the vectors, going into the ai file and changing the layer indexes will screw things up. For eg.
If there are currently Layer1, Layer2, Layer3 in the ai file, adding a layer in between Layer2 and Layer3, naming the new layer “Layer3” and renaming the previous “Layer3” to “Layer4”, will break things. However if you add a Layer4, on top of the currently existing Layers1 to 3, it works fine.
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Hi Zhiqun, thanks for the reply.
That makes sense, and I do add layers to the file over time, so that might cause a problem. But what is odd to me is that it works fine at first, and only after coming back several weeks later everything is messed up. I’ll pay attention to how I work in illustrator to not mess up layer indexes. Take care!
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