Quickly creating a lot of shape layers

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
February 16, 2024
2 replies
730 views

Hey, I have these shapes in a style frame in Illustrator, and I'm wondering if there's a way that I can quickly import this into after effects. I would typically use Overlord, but I want to very quickly change the "size" property of all of them (but Overlord converts them all to paths on import to After Effects).

Does anyone have a workflow for creating many distinct shapes like this from scratch in After Effects?

Thanks!

How to

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A

Airweb_AE

Legend

It's a bit tedious to create shapes using script

You can try/watch this tutorial: After Effects Scripting Tutorial: Recreate Shape Layers .

I prefer to create shapes in After Effects (1 shape per composition).

Then, I run a script to generate a grid of shapes / precomps.

You can also use some expressions to randomize shape settings such as fill and stroke color, size, type of shape, and so on...

I made this last year:

M

mrossi206Author

Participating Frequently

The randomization thing sounds perfect. So there's a way to define some base shapes and then have After Effects choose them at random and place them at predefined intervals? I'm imagining having 8 base shapes and placing them each as a new layer (randomly), so then I can stagger keyframes. Does that sound doable?

OussK

Community Expert

If you already have them in Illustrator, why do you want to create them from scratch in After Effects? You can simply import the AI file and convert it to shapes. Now, if you prefer each shape on a separate layer in AE, that's another matter, and you can easily achieve it using this free tools. https://motiondesign.school/products/motion-tools/ and you can use merge and extract shapes layer function

Mylenium

Legend

Since they're all just rectangles with rounded corners, circles and polygon shapes a script could produce them in bulk, including color rules and all that. You'd just have to write the script. Otherwise this seems easy enough to rebuild from scratch. Couldn't take more than an hour. It's just a bit of redundant, tedious work...

Mylenium

M

mrossi206Author

Participating Frequently

Great, thank you! Would you recommend any sources for getting starting with scripts? Any recommendations would be helpful!

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