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Shape as motion path
Warning: rank amateur ahead.
I used to know how to do this but my brain has been frozen the past year. I have AE CS3, I am wanting to animate the position of the Particle Playground cannon along the path of a shape, say a star for example. I can get to that through auto-trace of the star stroke but I seem to recall a much easier and efficient way but for the life of me, I cannot remember it. I’d greatly appreciate a boot in the general direction.
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3 Replies
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You can create a motion path from a shape path by copying and pasting. You select the Path property, copy, select the property to animate with the motion path, and then paste.
Your shape path must be a Bezier path, not a parametric path for this to work.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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Todd,
Sorry for the extremely tardy thank you to your reply.
Yes, I had gotten this to work quite easily with bezier paths. Let me more specific, I’d like to use a parametric path created by the shape tools as a motion path instead of the a hand drawn path from the pen tool. I thought I’d used a much easier method in the past other than using auto-trace on the layer.
Thanks.
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I was making this much more difficult than it really is. You did spur me in the right direction, the problem I was having is I was creating a separate shape layer and trying to use that shape to animate the Particle playground cannon.
On a whim and I should have known this, I used the shape tool on the solid layer to create a Mask Shape path on the solid. Easy to use this as the cannon animator now. However, if a path operand is used on a shape, I guess it’s easiest to use auto-trace to still create the mask shape to use as the motion path.
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