Make this into separate lines to animate

[Tom Morton]

I love illustrator but I’ve never got on well with the tracing function. I’ve never got good enough results out of it to use it professionally and every time I’ve tried I’ve ended up drawing the item manually instead.

Personally if it was me I’d start again with a blank canvas, add the design as a raster background and then draw over it manually. There are a few benefits to this method: you’ll get a cleaner, more accurate shape without any artifacts, all the lines will be perfectly straight and equal width, and any vector files you export to (such as SVG) will be much smaller and less complex.

Another advantage is that the tracing has turned the outline into a compound, filled shape which is much harder to animate. If you trace it manually instead using lines with an outline (no fill), you can import and animate them individually very easily in After Effects using the “trimpaths” property and other effects.

Recommend using the Pen tool [P] – you can click to add points or click and drag to add bezier points. you can also hold Shift to constrain lines to 45-degree increments. Once you’ve drawn a shape, use the Direct Selection tool [D] to select and move the points about to fine tune them.

Otherwise you could use the Polygon tool (right click on the Rectangle tool [M] to find) and create a couple of perfect hexagons. Click and drag, but before releasing, if it’s not a hexagon shape, press up and down arrows to change the amount of points in the polygon. Then add lines using the line tool [\] to connect the hexagon points.

Hope that helps to get you started! If you get stuck, you may find it helpful to watch some tutorials on the specific tools I’ve mentioned above.

[Darren Ruddock]

Hi Tom,

Many thanks, I will give that a try!