Illustrator to After Effects - The Field Manual Part 1

Amy Sundin : Hey guys, this is Amy from school of motion. And today I'm going to be taking you through how to get your illustrator assets into after effects as a motion designer. This stuff is super important because you're going to be doing it all the time. I'm going to show you a bunch of tips and tricks so that you can avoid some pitfalls and not get stuck midway through a project. Also scroll to the bottom of this page and sign up to be a VIP member because we're always giving out bonus content with this lesson, you'll get a PDF so that you don't have to go back through the whole video, just to remember something really quickly. Thanks for watching. Let's get started. All right, guys, let's get started with this tutorial. So I would like to apologize for my keyboard. It is the loudest keyboard on earth.
Amy Sundin : I will eventually replace it sooner rather than later. So we'll only have to deal with this for maybe the first two tutorials that I do. All right. So we were provided with this wonderful artwork by my buddy, John Craft. Um, he put it together and we have our three boards here. These are each different art boards. You know, we've got our different objects, kind of separated out into groups over here. And I want to mention that this is actually an EPS file. Now we're starting with an EPS file, just so that we can see how after effects handles those particular types of files. The short of it is after effects really doesn't handle those types of files. Well at all. So we are going to import this EPS file control. I to bring up the style log and you hit import, and we're going to comp that really quick.
Amy Sundin : And as you can see, this is not what we want at all. Our art boards are all just kind of spaced out. I mean, it brought it in pretty much exactly as it was laid out in after effects or illustrator, not what we want. We have no layers down here. We can't isolate these objects and the color space is actually wrong on this too. So we're going to go back into illustrator and we're going to fix this. Now, the first thing that we want to do is actually make an illustrator file. And that's just as simple as going up and hitting file save as, and then just selecting Adobe illustrator. We're going to take off our EPS suffix here, and you can just leave these default settings. These are completely fine to bring into after effects. Now, the other thing we need to address is that this isn't CMY K, and that's why the colors aren't showing up correctly.
Amy Sundin : Now this is a pretty easy fix. Also. Now it's not under color settings. Like you think it would be, see, this just brings up the profiles for Adobe. Instead. It is actually under file and then document color mode. And there's RGB color always takes me a little bit of thinking to make it through some of these menus. All right, so now we've taken care of the color space and the actual file type. So let's save this and won't bring it back into after effects and see what we get this time. Let's delete out these EPS files, all right, import coffee shop. And we're going to actually talk about the different ways to import things too. So for this first one, we're going to import it as footage. It's going to hit import, and we're going to leave it as footage, and we're going to leave it on merge, layers, and hit. Okay.
Amy Sundin : Now, as you can see, it brought in something a little bit different this time, but it's still not what we want. Now. What's going on here is after effects, just kind of picks and art board. I feel like it's arbitrary. There's probably some science to this, but it won't actually look at the art boards that are in the project file. It's just kind of going to pick one and that's the art that you're going to see, and this is all you're going to get. Now, when it's brought in is footage, it's doing what it's supposed to. As far as it being footage, you're going to get just one thing. Everything's going to be merged down together. That's completely normal. So we actually need to go back into illustrator and we need to get rid of those art boards. Now, the easiest way to do that is we're going to be doing some files, save as work here.