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I have TONS of masks…. effective management??
I’m copying and pasting some very complex work paths from photoshop via illustrator into ae, and I get, of course, 100s of individual mask shapes. Does anyone know of a way to import complex paths from ai so that they come in as one mask? Or perhaps a suggestion on the most efficient way to deal with tons of masks?
(btw., the goal here is to stroke/write-on effect over these paths, to make it look like a picture is being painted)
thx!!
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3 Replies
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No, not really. Either use them or don’t – there is no inbetween. At best you can optimize them in Illustrator using the Pathfinder and associated tools so there will be less masks to deal with, but you can’t get rid of that many of them it seems.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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So it goes. You can sometimes simplify things a bit, though. You might go ahead and apply your stroke, then go through and click on the masks one at a time to find where they are, and see if you can go without some of them. Many of them will be tiny, one- or two-point things that really aren’t even serving any purpose for what you’re doing.
Also, if you’re trying to make it all draw as one object – sort of an Etch-a-sketch effect – you’re probably (unfortunately) going to have to do a lot of manual masking – possibly simply connecting them so they all flow together.
Telling your Stroke to do all masks sequentially MAY work… but you’re probably going to have to go through your hundred of so masks and re-arrange them to make sure they’re in the correct order. Depending on what you’re doing, it may be easier to simply bring your original image into AE and trace it in one long, continuous mask.
Hope this helped a bit.
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thx for suggestions…I came up with a fairly good workaround: pasting different parts of the picture/work path into different layers. Then I can animate each layer/group of masks seperately, and then sequence the overall animation/illustration.
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