[Adam Neer]

Actually, as one of the previous posts mentions, the problem is related to having transparencies and gradients in your .ai file. After Effects can’t translate these when turning layers into shapes, so your best bet is to save your .ai file without any opaque layers or gradient fills and then work within After Effects to achieve the desired effect. Unfortunately the gradient tools aren’t as robust within AE as they are in Illustrator, but if you need to be able to animate this feature within your shape layers, this is the only way to do it.

Another thing I’ve realized is that if you have any compound shapes in your .ai file, they will be placed within a single group within the shape layer. Sometimes graphic artists will turn a group of objects into a single compound path, perhaps to cut down on clutter in the layers panel, so if you need to be able to transform everything individually, make sure to release any of these larger compound paths. Obviously though, you’ll want to keep any expanded text characters (A’s, O’s, g’s, etc.) as compound paths, to make sure they end up as their own groups in AE.

[Adam Neer]

I would also like to know the answer to the OP’s question, and I don’t think relevance has anything to do with it. Even if AE uses next to nothing in terms of the GPU, being able to monitor it would at the very least provide an outlet for curiosity. I currently use iStat menus, which seems to have a very limited “realtime” view of GPU usage.

[Adam Neer]

Also not exactly what you’re looking for, but the “Optimize Stills” checkbox in Media Encoder should output frames in a manner similar to what you describe.

[Adam Neer]

If you’re OK with having to manually keyframe the initial animation for each (via copy pasting transforms), you can use an excellent script called “Rift” (aescripts) to stagger, sequence, or randomize the keys or layer starts. The sequence function allows you to define the number of frames you want between the first and last keyframe, using several preset speed curves (from sine to expo) and whether you want the curve defined by keyframe in, out, or both. Stagger will let you set the number of frames between each set of staggered keyframes. Randomize allows you to set the min and max amount of frames you want it to randomize your selected keys or layers. Its an immensely useful script with a handy UI and amazingly, it is choose your own price. Probably one of the very best, most useful scripts available and worth much more than the modest suggested price.

of course, I’m sure there’s a way to do this by key framing a null and using some sort of time control expression to stagger your layers, but i think using Rift is much more flexible and allows for a lot of “creative trial and error”.

[Adam Neer]

Well, I tried your solution and unfortunately it is not an option for me. I’m guessing the reason it worked for you is because saving in that format makes AE merge all of the Illustrator layers into one AE layer, which can still be converted using the menu command, but will put all of the paths into one shape layer. My workflow relies on well organized and meticulously separated layers, which in terms of individual paths, can be as much as 100 in a single comp. Since AE doesn’t have any way to preview paths or groups in a shape layer, and since they are generically named “Group 1, Path 1” etc. upon conversion to shape layers, I need that organization to keep my sanity when finding individual elements. One feature I would absolutely love to be added to upcoming releases would be for AE to honor group names from Ai files. I would imagine this would be relatively easy to implement, considering it is able to recognize basically every other part of the file.

Long story short, I’m still looking for an answer to this annoying issue, but thanks for your suggestion.

[Adam Neer]

thanks, i’ll definitely try that out. honestly, i never thought it was a bug because it has happened on every project I’ve ever worked on that involved converting AI files. i figured surely there are enough animators out there utilizing this sort of workflow that there had to be a more logical explanation for it. sort of like how you’d think there was a rendering bug if you didn’t understand the layer order hierarchy for 3D layers, shadows, track mattes, masks, the puppet tool, etc…