Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you how to prepare your
Adobe Illustrator file for animation in Adobe AfterEffects. All right, let's get started. OK,
I'm here in Illustrator, and usually the way I do this is, I'll set up a canvas the same size as my
AfterEffects document. So we'll come over here to Create new. I'm going to choose Film & Video.
And then I usually choose 1920 by 1080, because that's the size I work in.
So we'll click that one, and then we'll Create. And if you're not crazy about all these guides on
here, you can just set up a normal document that's 1920 by 1080, and that'll work just as well.
So then I go ahead and make the design the way I want to see it in AfterEffects,
and I've already got one made, so I'm just going to paste that in. Now, everything that needs to
be animated separately, needs to be on its own layer eventually. But for now, I'm just going
to group the things that will move together with CMD G, or CTRL G on a PC. So, for example, this
timeline down here, has three ungrouped pieces at the moment. Usually the way I do this is,
I'll group the things that I want to group and then I'll hide them, so they'll be out of the way.
So I'm going to group this with CMD G, or CTRL G on a PC, and then hide with CMD 3, or CTRL 3.
These are already grouped the way I want them... these four little XYZ stocks...so
I'll go ahead and hide those with CMD 3 or CTRL 3. That one looks fine, so I'm going to hide that
one. I'll just click on each of the three pieces that I want, and hold SHIFT. I think I want to
include the text with that, too, so I'll group it with CMD G or CTRL G, and hide with CMD 3,
or CTRL 3. Now I actually have an action set up. So basically what this action does is it cuts,
it pastes in front, and then it groups, and then it hides. So if something's already in a group,
I can isolate it that way, in a way. OK, so I'm just going to run through the rest of these.
OK, and now I'm back to what I saw in the beginning. So now I just need to unhide
everything. So we'll go to Object>Show All. So now if I go to Window and >Layers and see what's
inside...I'm going to pull this out...you can see that I've got one layer. And then if I toggle this
arrow down, I've got all these different groups inside the layer. And I know it's a little weird
to have just regular text in here, but sometimes I find it faster to just do it here in Illustrator,
instead of creating it in AfterEffects. Now we need to have each of these on its own layer,
and so to do that, we've got to get them out of this layer. But right now, we can't actually
just click and drag them out. We get a little prohibited icon if we try to do that. I'll click
on this little circle next to Layer 1, and then I'll come over here to the drop down and choose
Release to Layers (Sequence). And now these have all become layers. They're still inside Layer 1,
but now we can just select them all and pull them up outside of Layer 1. Now Layer 1 is empty,
so I'm just going to throw it away. Now everything that's going to be animated is in its own layer,
and it's actually called Layer. And that's what we want. So now we can go through and
rename all of our layers. And sometimes it's kind of hard to see what it is,
but you can just click the eyeball off and on, or you can click over here to be taken
to the layer that it is. So I'm going to double click on the layer name and rename
all my layers to something that would make sense. So this one will be $100 price tag.
This one will be background. And I'll just speed up the video while I rename the rest.
Finally, the last step is to just save your file. So I'm going to hit CMD S or CTRL S.
And I'll save this as 'Short'. And then we'll say OK. Now we can go out to AfterEffects.
And I'll just double click over here in the Project window. I'll navigate to my Illustrator
file and click it, then come down here to Import As: and choose 'Composition - Retain Layer Sizes',
and we'll Open. When we do this, we get a composition in our Project window,
and we also get a folder with all of those layers inside. So what we can do is just
double click on our composition and it'll open it. Now you can see all the layers in
the composition. And we can start animating. So I'll move out over here. I'll hit T for opacity.
And then I'll just move this back here, change it to 0%. And now when we hit Play,
that one comes into view. And of course, you can animate them to move to different parts of the
screen or whatever you want to do. All right, if you liked this video, please click on the 'Like'
button. And I'll see you in a couple days with another graphic design tutorial. Thank you!!!