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Illustrator paths not lining up as motion paths in AE! Please put me out of my misery…
I’ve been working 80+ hours on this graduation animation. It’s for a training DVD that is supposed to show the specific paths of travel for everyone involved throughout the ceremony. The animation will be 7 minutes long when complete. I thought it was going to take me 40 hours to complete! (insert psychotic sleep deprived laughter here) I have had some success in animating 2d vector graduates around in 3D space and multiplying the grads with Trapcode Echospace. I built all the imagery in Illustrator, including all the vector paths of travel which I have been converting to motion (position) paths in AE. You can see a sample here:
https://www.flowmotionmedia.com/clips/Commencement_Sample2.wmv
However, due to time constraints (more psychotic laughter) I decided to do a good chunk of the animation as purely 2D. (Think birdseye view of the stadium floor with color coded dots following respective paths.) Everything seems to go well until I paste the vector paths from Illustrator into the Position data for my animated dot (graduate) in After Effects. The path shows up in its entirety and on the correct 2D plane, but it is scaled much larger than the image it should be matched to. See it here: (The path should match one of the yellow strokes)
https://www.flowmotionmedia.com/images/motion-path.jpg
How do I get this to match up? Can I scale it down to match? Second deadline now whooshing past… help, please.
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5 Replies
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Don’t use the Illustrator vector as a motion path. Bag it. Draw your own. It will take you ten seconds.
This is a lot of work to show college graduates how to walk down an aisle.
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Sounds good. I know how to draw a mask, but how do I draw a motion path, other than actually hand animating the object? I was hoping to use my Illustrator paths because they are already drawn and there are a lot of them. It’s actually not for the graduates, it’s for the marshals that have to route the graduates.
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I can bring the Illustrator paths in as masks and they match up perfectly, but as soon as I try to paste the mask to an object’s position layer it gets resized.
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That screen grab shows the screwed up motion path, not the mask. The mask is perfectly aligned until I try to make it a motion path. I’ll give your suggestion a try though. I’m willing to try anything at this point.
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Thanks Dave! You are a genius… quit being so modest. I ended up pasting my paths directly to the football field layer, adjusting the alignment and then copying and pasting those corrected masks to my animation objects. It worked! I haven’t slept in three days, but I feel pretty good. Thanks again! Now I can get this thing finished…
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