From Photoshop to Illustrator to Invig

[Jon Okerstrom]

Hi Zack,

Here’s the process.

In Adobe Illustrator: Import your Photoshop logo. Lock it or put it in a locked layer. You’re going to use it as a template for creating your 3D objects.

Now, use Illustrator’s tools to create the basic shapes in the logo. You can create one shape for the whole thing or shapes for individual parts. It helps to create filled solids with no stroke, and to put them on individual named layers if you have a lot of parts. You can apply fill color the parts like your photoshop logo if you want – it will help later.

You can get remove the photoshop logo when you’re done and save the Illustrator file with use compression unchecked.

Now apply Invig to a comp-sized solid in After Effects. The plugin will ask you to choose and Illustrator file. Go ahead. Use open by layers if you have layers in Illustrator. Choose use Illustrator colors if you want that too.

Now you should have a bunch of 3d shapes in the Scene Preview window. Use the tools in the setup window to move some forward on the Z scale and some back. When you have your starting position the way you want, assign the objects to different sets and animate the sets.

This should get you started… have fun.

Jon

[Zack Florance]

Hi and Thanks Jon. Allthough I’m running into a software issue when I do this. I did this in Illustrator to my logo and when I try to open it in Invigorator, I get an error message: “Failure during Sequence Setup – Main (4)” What could I be doing wrong? Thanks.

[Jon Okerstrom]

I’m not sure, but I’ll look at your Illustrator file if you want.

jokerstrom1 (at) mac.com

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

To follow up for those following the thread…

The logo was autotraced and included some odd compouund paths. It required a good deal of clean-up and heavy use of spikebuster to make it work. A far easier solution would have been to manually draw the logo in Illustrator using the photoshop art as a template.

Jon