[Colin Wood]

Wow wow wow. Just tried the demo and that is perfect!

Unfortunately, I don’t really have a budget for the project so I can’t justify buying the plugin. If I did more AE work then maybe I could take the hit. I may have to stick with the C4D route but at least I know that if the client is pressing then I have a backup option.

[Colin Wood]

Hi guys, me again! Thanks for all your help with this. As mentioned, I put it on hold as he client was happy with the circular rotation for the time being. Now the client has finally come back to me, so I thought before I jump back into thing i’d reach out on here again first.

Mainly, i’m now thinking of tackling the issue in Cinema 4D (as suggested here earlier). I’ve done a quick test with a n-sided spline and a cube with an Align to Spline tag, and it pretty much works flawlessly (i’m a 3D artist by trade so I don’t know why I didn’t go down this route when suggested originally).

What will be uncharted territory for me however, is bringing in the vector files, and projecting/rendering the C4D animation as a 2D animation ready to bring into After Effects. Any advice on how to approach this would be great, as well things to consider (having each of the 8 arrows as a separate layer in AE would be great for example. Ideally I want to keep some sort of link between the fully animate-able vector file and the animated arrows using C4D.

Thanks guys.

[Colin Wood]

That’s pretty much perfect, thank you!

The example file you also put together is also very helpful. I’ve looked at everything and it really is simple to achieve. My only minor complaint if i’m being picky is that the animation is very smooth would benefit from being a little more linear. I’m guessing I can fix this by tightening up the corners on the bezier curve?

This is going to save me a massive headache when the client comes back to me for this. Thanks again!

[Colin Wood]

Thanks for the help!

These two features are two of the (many) areas of AE I don’t have much experience in to be honest, since I mainly use it for 3D compositing and basic motion. I played with the puppet pin tool and I could see how easy it was to form the basic shape from a straight arrow, but I struggled to process how I would turn that into a full blown animation.

It doesn’t help atm that all my layers are pulled in from a vector file, so I may need to scrap the arrows that came with the diagram and redraw my own straight version for the purpose of animation?

[Colin Wood]

Thanks for the response. The Omino Snake plugin was the first thing I tried. It worked to an extent, but gave some problems that were proving hard to work around and it the result weren’t too great.

For now my client has said that it isn’t too important, and would prefer it quickly as opposed to going through any long drawn out processes. I decided to just rotate the arrows in a circular motion for now and just scale them out a bit so that they don’t intersect the inner diagram.

I think it’s something he will be asking me to revisit in the future however, so i’m still going to need to solve this eventually. It doesn’t help that the vector file given to me isn’t the cleanest, so i’m probably going to have to do a redraw and hopefully I can plan for this animation a bit better then.

[Colin Wood]

Thanks for the response. That would be a great automated solution and something I considered experimenting with. A tricky situation that would have arose is that the colour of each arrow also alternated, and there would be text attacvhed to each arrow.

I wonder if there is some sort of option to ‘bake’ that stroke animation? Once I have that animated I could maybe do some manual editing afterwards.