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Pasting Illustrator path into AfterEffects while maintaining screen position
First time I’ve had to do this. When I past the path into my comp it shows up offset from its original position. This leads to time-consumning and ultimately less than satisfactory manual re-positioning. What’s the secret?
Greg Quitiquit
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10 Replies
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I assume you’re talking about Illustrator paths. I did a couple of tests and when I used crop marks in the AI file, imported it into AE, then copied and pasted the path, it was offset. When I removed the cropmarks, imported the AI file, then pasted the path, it was in perfect registration. Does this help?
JD
John Dickinson
Motionworks
http://www.motionworks.com.au -
is the the screen size the same of your ae project the same as it is in illustrator ?
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Yes, I am referring Illustrator paths. No, this doesn’t help. I had no crop marks to remove. I did find a workaround, but it’s a little awkward. In the Illustrator document, I included a rectangular path that was the same size as the comp and copied and pasted both into AE. This centered the comp-sized path and put the other path in the correct position. I then deleted the comp-sized path.
I have a hard time believing this is the only way to do this, but at least for now I’m back in business.
Thanks,
Greg Q. -
[aptjel] “is the the screen size the same of your ae project the same as it is in illustrator ?”
Yes.
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Believe it. There are other bugs with Illustrator and AE6.5. I especially like the one where any AI layers that have a gradient applied are cropped weirdly in AE when imported as Composition-Cropped Layers.
Glad you found a work-around.
JD
John Dickinson
Motionworks
http://www.motionworks.com.au -
In all my Illustrator art for AE, I create a layer with a rectangle that has no fill or line. Doesn’t matter how big it is, as long as my art never exceeds it.
When you import to AE, everything should line up. (you may need to specify “document size”, not “crop”) The added benefit to this, and the original reason I started doing it, is because invariably I’d need to go back and modify my original art. But if my modification make my layers larger (than a pretend bounding box that all the layers fit inside), it would shift my center point on all the layers. Having an invisible rectangle layer that was always bigger than any art solved this.
-GregAntifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezemotiongraphics.com -
This is basically the same as creating a “crop area” using the crop area command. The problem here is that pasted masks aren’t pasting in register with the Illustrator artwork using either of these methods.
JD
John Dickinson
Motionworks
http://www.motionworks.com.au -
I dont think pasted Illustrator paths as masks in AE have ever mantained proper position and size. Every tutorial, personal projects, etc. The paths always have to be re-aligned…..who knows??
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The workaround I posted above, and that someone else echoed, works.
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I’ve though about this some more. Greg’s workaround of pasting an extra path the size of the document in AI is the best (and only) way to do this I have heard so far. It seems that when you paste a path as a mask it gets pasted so that it’s centre is the centre of the composition. To get it to paste in the position of the imported AI layer there would have to be some kind of translation of position information from Illustrator to AE and at the moment AE doesn’t account for a crop area set in AI when pasting paths. The best case would be if AE imported the paths by default like Combustion, so that all AI layers have their relevant mask by default.
JD
John Dickinson
Motionworks
http://www.motionworks.com.au
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