[James Pierson]

Hi Corrado,

Thanks so much for the quick reply. The only issue is I’m trying apply this technique in order to make an eye blink for a dinosaur (as real as possible) so I need the upper/lower eye lids to stretch/move with the rest the face in a more natural way. So ideally I need to be able to manipulate the mesh as a whole. Any advice on how you would achieve this?

Many thanks!

[James Pierson]

Hi Dave,

Thanks for the quick reply, much appreciated. Unfortunately I can’t seem to get either bulge or Spherize to give me the nice wave rumble look that I’m after. If only wave warp had a setting where you could define the section which is effected. I don’t suppose you know if C4D lite has a deformer that would give a similar effect? If not its ok, always have the back up of going the frame by frame route.

Many thanks,
J

[James Pierson]

Hi Declan,

Thank you for taking the time to respond. Effectively what im trying to do is animate a whiteboard style animation in after effects.

Ideally i’d draw the characters inside illustrator with the line/pen tool, copy this into after effects as a mask, apply the stroke effect, reveal the line, and then copy the mask path properties onto the position layer of a hand holding a pan, sync up the key frames so it looks like the hands drawing out the image.

Its all great in theory but the problem I get is when I copy the path from illustrator into after effects, it comes in as 50+ masks(unfortunately trying the ‘unite’ function in illustrator doesnt help either)as the image is complex. This is fine to apply a stroke to, but I can’t copy the mask path properties of each mask path into the position of the hand as its to time consuming and also would be difficult to sync up properly if I was using easing etc.

So! What I wanted to do, was to copy the path from illustrator to after effects, apply the stroke effect to ‘all the masks’ to get a nice reveal. I then duplicate the layer, and make the line colour vivid (in this case tried red) and thicken up the line. Now, rather than reveal all the lines as if being drawn out, I tried to make it so the stroke ‘start’ and ‘end’ keyframes made a dot that zipped along the front of the path.

I would then export this as a png sequence or mp4, bring it back into after effects, lay it over the initial image being drawn out, track the red dot data, then apply it to the hand image and hey presto it would follow along.

I’ve done white board animations inside after effects before by having the image I want to reveal, drawing a mask by hand over the top of it and applying stroke to it, to then copy the mask path into hand position. I’m certainly prepared to do it that way again, but I found its slightly time consuming, and when lines intersect it can be a little messy.

I just thought it seems like the answers so close what with illustrator/after effects path compatibility, but I can’t figure it out! I was hoping it would be simple to track a red dot on a white background and my problem would be solved, but if I have to track the dot by hand every time it drifts off course then that would probably be more time consuming than my old method.

Any comments/work arounds I’m not seeing would be greatly appreciated!

[James Pierson]

I’ve attached a quick screen shot,

I just drew a simple snail to illustrate the problem. The top version of the snail is what I would like to bring into after effects as a single path (at the moment inside illustrator it says it is made up of 4 paths, despite all being connected).

Once in after effects I want to be able to apply the stroke effect, as well as copy the mask path properties into an assets positioning, so the asset follows along the path at the same time the stroke effect reveals the lines (in the screen shot, I would like the blue circle to following the path)

At the moment when I bring this image into after effects, it recognises it as 4 individual masks, which means I can still apply the stroke effect (using ‘apply to all masks’ option) and reveal the image, but I can’t however use it to copy the mask path into an assets positioning.

This is just a simple example of the issue, as if the image was this simple I could just use the pen tool to quickly trace around the image and problem solved, but my actual image is a lot more complex and if I I could just get this to be recognised as one path it would save me a lot of hand masking time…

The image underneath the snail is the same snail as above, but with the ‘unite’ option applied to it in the pathfinder window. As you can see it joins everything up but with distorted straight lines.

[James Pierson]

Hi,

Thanks Roland and Darby for the replies.

I tried auto trace, it traces the image well enough, but again, it makes it into tons of individual masks, which means I cant have an image follow the masks path as the mask is revealed with stroke..(copying the mask path into the assets position)

I’ve also tried the unite option with the pathfinder in illustrator. I’m not sure if im doing it wrong, but it acts much the same as using the ‘join’ path command, where all the lines are joined but spread loads of crazy straight lines all over the image in doing so…

[James Pierson]

Thanks so much guys, I did what you suggested and drew a spline, then used the lathe extruder – worked perfectly.

Thanks again!
James

[James Pierson]

Thanks so much for both your work arounds, ive come very close to what I would like to achieve. So I have the letters coming up in sequence, having played with the ‘start’ offset keyframes. Although at the moment it seems that the first couple of letters just scale up to 100% while the last couple have the bounce, so not sure what im doing wrong?

Thanks again,
James