ianrobertdouglas
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Everything posted by ianrobertdouglas
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Perspective scaling of vector objects
ianrobertdouglas replied to tomexx's topic in Older Feedback & Suggestion Posts
1+ for this. Ability to skew, distort vectors in various ways would be great -
A raster preview would be a good idea, but personally I'd still be unable to use it. I cannot have any rasterised content at all in nearly everything I do. I understand that raster content doesn't matter so much, say, in app or web development. But I need my work to scale sometimes to the size of a billboard. I cannot go raster, period. I'm hoping that the AD development team can give this a fresh look at some point in the future. There are a number things you can do in Illustrator while remaining vector that cannot be done yet in AD. I'm sure this is probably due to where AD is focusing (closer to Sketch than Illustrator). I know the team are working very, very hard. I have to be patient.
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Thank you! Exporting to .png / .jpg from my example indeed gets rid of the line, which is weird; I could have sworn I've seen lines like this pass over into bitmap exports before. Otherwise I have no real problem with that line. But that preference option does the trick within AD, so I'm doubly covered. Thanks!
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I've faced this issue for a long time and I'm finally getting around to asking for help / trying to verbalise it. I've attached a simple example. In the example, there is an A converted to a curve. I want to cut part of the A away, so I make a shape and nest it under the A (or within the A; not sure of the correct terminology). There is no stroke on the A. But you can see in the attached pic that nesting still leaves two light grey lines. The problem is that these grey lines also pass over into .png or .jpg output. If that shape wasn't nested (the shape is bigger than the part of the A it is covering) those lines, of course, wouldn't be there. And I know I can use the shape to cut that part of the A away entirely (so a destructive subtraction). But this is just an example to show what I'm talking about. Sometimes in more complex design situations I'd like to use this nesting concept but I face this thin grey line issue. Usually I get around it by cleaning up a design and cutting or subtracting, etc. But I often lose time doing that on what are draft proposals that may not be accepted, whereas if I didn't have that line I could "show" the concept and it would be clean without having -- in a word -- to "flatten" the vector and get rid of such lines. Am I missing something basic here? testA.afdesign
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This might be a stretch, but it's just a suggestion. I almost always need solely vector output. All of the neat things in AD (grain textures, blend effects in particular) are raster-based, sadly. So I cannot use any of that. I wish there was a preferences menu item that would allow me to hide any and all functions that would ultimately lead to rasterised areas. That way I could see what I have to work with an avoid anything that would lead away from pure vector output at the end of the design process. What I really wish is that all the beautiful effects AD has could be vector based.
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Under v1.4.2, if I use the Vector Crop tool (say on a simple shape with nothing else, for testing purposes) and then try to save/export as .svg or .eps, I'm told there's "nothing to rasterise". But in the 1.5 beta version 2, if I use that same tool I get "some areas will be rasterised."
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Adding my voice to this request. I use AD mainly for logo design. When I have to, I'm using shapes and boolean operations to cut, remove, etc. A simple erase brush would be a nice addition to the available tools. As I need always all content in vector, I'm wary of swapping into pixel mode.
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+1 for this. Right now, Arabic script is split up into separate letters. Please support Arabic.
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In general, is there is a good way to reduce the number of nodes in a curve? Right now, I'm recreating things.
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Blender is high on my list of apps I'd love to vaguely become proficient in. Your other suggestion is probably, in actual fact, the far quickest way. I'm persevering in the hope of picking up the beginning of a new skill. The easiest way for me would be using the Snap.svg javascript library. But with so many layers I was hoping to take advantage of something with a GUI.
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Thank you, Alex. I've downloaded the Motion User Guide and will try to figure things out. The problem, in a way, is that what I want to do is not really what Motion was designed to do, so there's very little on it in the support community page, or elsewhere.
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@ronniemcbride Just from a quick look, it's the most intuitive for simple animations (or ones you can easily reconstruct). I think layered .svg's are in the development pathway, at least according to their forum, so maybe in a future release what I want to do now would be easier.
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Thanks Yasir. I'm trying it out now. I've managed to get vector layers into it. Just trying to figure out how to actually animate them. Somehow dropping behaviors on them isn't working. But maybe there's a stage I'm missing.
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yeah, I can imagine. To be honest, I don't want to do anything too fancy. Simple (but elegant) fade in and fade out would be mostly enough. Maybe with one final group transition. So imagine 20 vector dots. Each fading in in sequence. This is the main part. At present I have vector layers in Motion. I'm just trying to figure out how to actually animate them. Any animation effect. When I get on top of that, I'll go from there. It's just a bit confusing because applying behaviours is not currently doing anything. I'll keep going. It's probably just because I don't know the app. I'm looking at YouTube tutorials, trying to find something useful and close to what I'm trying to do.
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Hype doesn't allow importing layered .svg or other vector files, unfortunately. I could use something like Sketch to generate individual .svg's for each layer, but in pulling these into Hype I'd have to reconstruct the graphic in terms of layout. The problem is that I have 400+ dots in a geometrical pattern.
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Just in case others have the same problem, I'm finding that it's only the .svg format on export that preserves folders. Not .eps or .pdf
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Just a quick update: OpenTOonz I'm sure is a great and serious tool. But as a novice I find the interface as confusing / intimidating as After Effects. I couldn't work out how to import an .svg or .eps file. At least there seemed no apparent way to do it. I also have no luck with After Effects. Trying to import as a Composition with layers preserved, I still don't see any layers. Just one flat image. Anime Studio Pro has options for importing vector files, but when I tried I couldn't find any layers to work with, and it added a heavy stroke to many of the elements in my .eps file. I set all of the above aside and did as A_B_C suggested and exported from AD as .psd and opened in Apple Motion. I see layers, but I cannot see how I can actually animate them. Watching a few YouTube tutorials, I started to question: am I supposed to now draw over elements in Motion (i.e., from within the app) and apply animation effects to these "masks"? I have around 400 small dots in this graphic, as well as other things. Some of the dots are very small. They're also geometrically aligned. I'm hoping I don't have to redraw all of them. I'm probably as dumb as a brick, but I'm really surprised that it's proving as difficult to animate a layered vector file. As for Flash, there's no way I can see to import a .svg or .eps file either. Which is just weird given that .svg is a native output format of Flash. In short, I'm struggling. p.s., I should add that in After Effects, it seems to convert the vector file you import to bit map. At least in the main viewer, if I scale up it's horribly pixelated.
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Thanks. But my hope was to avoid rasterising my graphic. I know ultimately it will be rasterised (as a .gif), but I hoped there would be only one pass, in this sense. Instead of being converted to .gif from a raster.
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I don't know if there's some trick that I'm missing, but it cannot import .svg, and if you import as .pdf, all the layers disappear.
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Thanks. Would it work as a standalone, or I need FCPX also?
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Indeed. The final output will be .gif. I'm just hoping to get there with the least drop in quality. In Principle app (which I think is not suited to my needs), you start with raster (and not what I would say is high quality). Ending with it would be fine. To be honest, I don't know what they are. It's basically a bunch of simple shapes. But there are a lot of them, and I need to carefully time their appearance and disappearance. And I'd like different ease-in and ease-out options. Grouping and grouped transitions would be great too. That looks great. What I need to do would be more like a cartoon than After Effects normally does. I'll try to see if there's a trial. I wish! But this is for my first Dribbble shot -- the initial "hello". So it would cheating in a way to not do it all myself. I've done basic .svg animations before, for the web. I was looking for a bit more control, especially given the number of layers. But I also need a manageable learning curve, because I was just drafted and I really should get on with it and say "hello".
- 26 replies
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- animation
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I have a fairly complex (400+layers) graphic I need to animate. I've looked at After Effects, but while it is a stunningly capable app, it's very much overkill for my needs, and the learning curve is probably a month (along with the headaches). I also looked at Principle and Flinto. Here you need Sketch as a bridge. Principle and Flinto are basically for animating transitions within mobile apps, or web applications. They work by artboards, where one artboard represents a frame. The problem is that they rasterise your content. I hate seeing pixels now that I'm used to vector level definition! There is also good old Flash Professional to consider. Finally, I could simply animate a .svg with javascript. But I was kind of looking for a GUI app to make essentially doing the same thing easier. My question: I'm looking for the easiest, most intuitive way to animate a layered vector graphic while retaining these elements as vector shapes, not rasters. Does anyone have experience? Please share your thoughts. Thanks.
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@Leigh. My error on the layers. I had two versions of Illustrator on my system, including an old one, and I missed that the old one, not the new, was opening by default. Please excuse me this idiotic mistake. In the newer version (2015), layers, folders, are retained. Any thoughts on my side question: recommendations for programs other than After Effects to animate vector graphics?
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1) I made a fairly complex graphic with probably 200+ layers and I aim to animate this graphic, probably in After Effects. I named all my elements and organised them in folders and subfolders so it would be easy to identify what is what when it comes to creating the animation. I'm pretty new to After Effects, so learning how to pull files from Illustrator and move forward. The problem I have is: If I export (to .eps, .pdf or .svg) all the folders vanish. In Illustrator there is simply one folder with all the various layers in it (I'm on Illustrator CC 2015 v.19). If find Illustrator's interface a nightmare. Do I really have to go through 200+layers and put them in folders all over again? 2) Do you have any recommendations for programs other than After Effects (which is great, but very complex for my needs) that would work well in animating something produced in AD?