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Illustrator Pattern edges visible in AE
I’m an After Effects person, but I get a lot of Illustrator files to animate. I’m great at dividing these into layers to take into AE and making sure everything is the right color, but that’s about it.
My client has added a new designer, and the files I’m getting now show the lines between the pattern swatches when I bring them into AE (see the screen shot). They don’t show these edge lines in AI, but they appear in my video exports which is no bueno. I don’t know how to tell this designer to fix their files, and I’d like to just be able to fix them myself rather than waiting to get updated files.
My current solution is to replace their pattern swatch with older swatches that work, but I’d love to know the solution since they can get a little picky on their dot patterns sometimes. So if you can tell a poor AE animator the secret to AI patterns without edge lines in simple, AE friendly terms, I will be forever in your debt!
Thanks!
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3 Replies
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You’re encountering an issue related to Anti-aliasing. It can sometimes result in unwanted lines or artefacts in digital artwork.
You can select the object with the pattern swatch in Illustrator, and then choose, Object > Path > Outline Stroke from the menu. This will convert the stroke of the object to a fill, which should eliminate any unwanted lines or artefacts.
Or you could try adjusting the anti-aliasing settings in Illustrator. To do this, choose, Edit > Preferences > General (Windows) and then experiment with different anti-aliasing options to see if any of them produce better results.
Once-over you’ve made these changes in Illustrator, save the file and import it into After Effects as you normally would. The pattern swatch will appear without any unwanted lines or artefacts.
I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.
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Thanks for the suggestions, but sadly, they didn’t fix the issue.
My current solution is turning their pattern layers solid, creating the dot pattern in AE, using the AI layer as a mask and parent. It’s inelegant and creates an 2 extra layers for every object (rather than a single layer, I have the outline, the fill mask, and the AE pattern).
I would LOVE to know how to fix this. I thought I’d fixed it as a 4×8 pattern set to brick offset seems to work okay, but those dots are spaced too far apart for today’s animation.
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Just had the same problem, I figured it out using the “obect > expand” command in illustrator, on my shape with the patterns.
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