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oskarigeo
oskarigeo
Participating Frequently
October 23, 2017
Question

How to bake in / flatten a shape transformation?

  • October 23, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 6885 views

I've got a comp that animates the Skew transformation property on a Shape layer content group. Everything looks great, but my problem is that the animation is to be used by the Lottie animation library, and Lottie does not support Skew transformations.

The only way I can think to get around this is to "bake in" the Skew transformation frame-by-frame, so that the shape actually "flattens" to be in the shape of the Skew in each frame, while the actual Skew transformation is zeroed out. Something similar in behaviour to the Expand / Expand Appearance functionalities in Illustrator?

I tried Auto-Trace, but the results aren't very desirable.

Is what I'm describing possible in After Effects? If so, how?

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    2 replies

    Mylenium
    Mylenium
    Legend
    October 23, 2017
    Is what I'm describing possible in After Effects? If so, how?

    Not using your method. You would have to use a normal recatngle pathe and animate its shape.

    Mylenium

    oskarigeo
    oskarigeoAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    October 24, 2017

    Mylenium  wrote

    You would have to use a normal recatngle pathe and animate its shape.

    The problem is, many of my shapes are a lot more complex than a simple rectangle, so manually editing the path isn't very feasible.

      R
      Community Expert
      Rick GerardCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      October 24, 2017

      If you want to turn a property into keyframes for every frame then simply adding an expression and then using the keyframe assistant to convert expression to keyframes will give you a keyframe on every frame. That would give you a skew value for every frame but it would not zero anything out. I’m not familiar with the Lotti animation library but if you are talking about applying skew to a shape path and then creating a new path from that shape I don’t think that is possible even with an expression.

      I don’t know what you are trying to do but the first thought I have would be to use a blend in illustrator, then expand the blend, release to layers, import as a  comp, convert the layers to shape layers, set a path keyframe for each layer, then use some kind of scripting or an expression to create a new animated single shape layer path from each of the keyframes on the imported layers.

      It would probably help us help you if you gave us a little more detail on your comp and the requirements of the project.

      Szalam
      Community Expert
      SzalamCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      October 23, 2017

      I do not know of a way to do what you are asking. It might be something that could be scripted, but I haven't seen a script made for this yet. You might check over on AEscripts.com though. You might contact some authors of other shape layer scripts to see how doable this would be.

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