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Shapes from illustrator vector have separate groups for stroke and fill of same object
I’m trying to create shapes from my vector layer that’s been created in illustrator (not by me). When I do, every piece that has a fill and a stroke gets separated into two DIFFERENT groups, one for the fill and one for the stroke, within the shape. so if I manipulate one of the pieces, it’s stroke doesn’t do anything on account of automatically being in a different group.
Is there any way to get it to quit doing this? Or is this a question for the Illustrator section? Maybe I’ll go post this there too.
All of my adobe programs are the latest iteration. In illustrator they’re just normal shape paths that have a fill and a stroke together on the same object. I save it out with the pdf compatible thing checked.
Any help is much appreciated.
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6 Replies
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could you upload a tiny version of that Ai file? there could be a number of scenarios where Ae will create unnecessary groups. most of the time you have to prepare your Ai file before you send it to Ae.
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/preparing-importing-still-images.htmlRoei Tzoref
After Effects Artist & Instructor
♫ Ae Blues Tutorials -
I guess it must be because there are images in the file as well, because if I save the file without the jpegs in it then it works fine. I’ll just have to separate out all of the images from each file they sent me.
I don’t, however, know how to get rid of the extra groups that wind up being “merged” with a path that’s the size of the illustrator comp. I miss the days when it would convert to a shape without that added inconvenience.
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opacity or blend mode changes to the object will cause “create shapes from vector layer” to behave in the following manner: your shape layer will have an additional group in the shape hierarchy that will contain paths that constitute your Ai artboard and another merge paths operation. Long story short: opacity / blend mode in your Ai object will cause it’s shape bounding box to be artboard size and not layer size.
What to do?
if it’s after the fact: you can either delete those from your shapes that come as artboard size, or remove the blend mode / opacity from the layers in Ai, save the file again, and create shapes from vector layer again.before the fact – proper workflow: it is already known that opacity and blend mode (and not only them) don’t translate to a corresponding shape anyway, so this makes this an easy workflow decision: if you do plan to convert to shapes, prior to importing to Ae – set your blend modes to normal and opacity to 100% if it’s not.
there’s also this script: Explode Shape Layers 3 – aescripts + aeplugins – aescripts.com that is very handy for dealing with the whole conversion of Ai to shapes and it has the “Remove Artboard” feature. this from the script description: If any of your Illustrator layers have non-100% opacity or go outside of the frame, you’ve probably noticed that converting brings in an empty artboard artifact that gets in the way. No more! Remove it with Remove Artboard.
Roei Tzoref
After Effects Artist & Instructor
♫ Ae Blues Tutorials -
Thank you. It’s a board from a client so I guess I’ll just have to spend extra time making sure none of them has an opacity change and go back into after effects and do it.
I’ll check out the script too. Much appreciated.
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Yes, that’s the common practice. Just to make sure – This is only relevant when you convert to shapes. You only need to convert to shapes if you plan to animate the path or it’s attributes or apply path operators. Other than that you are fine with just Ai layers and they will be exactly how you left them in Ai.
Roei Tzoref
After Effects Artist & Instructor
♫ Ae Blues Tutorials
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