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J
Jane289706152awj
Participating Frequently
February 3, 2026

Illustrator vectors disappearing randomly after imported into After Effects

  • February 3, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 61 views

I noticed after the latest V26.0 update this issue kept popping up. Case in point, after I've imported my illustrations into AE, random layers seem to disappear even though they are still there in the illustrator file. As you can glimpse from the thumbnail the head of the character is still there but disappears in the AE comp.

The solution is for me to open the illustrator file, click save again and wait for the link to update in AE. Trouble is random layers from other illustrations would again disappear every time I open my AE file again to start my animation. 

Another issue is that the blend mode from illustrator is not pulling through to AE, for example the neck shadow is multiply 40% but in AE it’ll just be Normal 100%. Then randomly it’ll correct itself or reset every time I restart my AE.

The obvious solution is to create shape in AE but I have textures in my illustrations and it’ll be chaotic to redo the illustration just for 4 seconds of animation.

Hope there’ll be a patch soon for this issue!

 

    2 replies

    J
    Jane289706152awjAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    February 4, 2026

    Can confirm the mere act of opening Illustrator causes the glitch. I opened an .ai file to quickly do something unrelated to the linked files, come back to my still running AE to discover a different missing layer, except this time the opacity is also affected.

    This issue goes away after I’ve restart the AE. But it has made me very paranoid and I'll have to make sure to close my AE before working on Illustrator, finish up illustrator and close it before starting my AE projects.

    nishu_kush
    Community Manager
    nishu_kushCommunity Manager
    Community Manager
    February 10, 2026

    That’s really strange! Do you mind sharing the project and media files so that I can test them on my end? Feel free to share them via DM if you prefer not to share publicly.

    Looking forward to your response.

     

    Thanks,

    Nishu

    nishu_kush
    Community Manager
    nishu_kushCommunity Manager
    Community Manager
    February 3, 2026

    That’s not ideal. Sorry to hear about the issue.

    Are the layers missing in the export as well? Can you try clearing media cache (Edit > Purge > All Memory & Disk cache)?

    Let me know.

     

    Thanks,

    Nishu

    J
    Jane289706152awjAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    February 4, 2026

    Hi Nishu, yes I’ve tried clear cache but the problem is still there, and it’s completely random every restart, I'd have to restart my Mac and the problem will not be there but the longer hours I worked, the random disappearing layers happen even though I have no other programs running. Initially I suspected that opening illustrator causes the issue but it still happens even when I do not have illustrator running in the background. 

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