Separate groups for fill and stroke from illustrator

Question

I am beginning to lose my patience.

I have an illustrator file that I have pulled into AE. When I do so and create a shape from a vector layer it keeps generating separate groups for the stroke and the fill. It's driving me insane, there is no apparent reason for this behaviour and i've spent the last four hours trying to figure this out.

Layers are released to sequence
There are no brushes on the fill objects, the stroke is set to basic.
All blending is set to normal (much to my irritation, having to remove all of the shading) and opacity across all of the layers is 100%

What am I missing here? Adobe won't let me upload either the ai or the aep files and gives the following error:

The attachment's tv_unicorn.ai content type (application/postscript) does not match its file extension and has been removed.

So that's not helpful either.

Rick Gerard · Answer

Unless you are using Shape Layer animators, animating the actual vector path and/or properties of a shape that will take keyframes, using a shape layer path as a motion path, or extruding a shape layer, there is no reason to convert Vector layers to shape layers. If you have one or two shapes in your Illustrator file that you want to animate, then you should put those shapes on a separate layer in AI, name the layer, then convert only that layer.

If you are getting a bunch of groups that are hard to deal with, the problem is not After Effects, it is the way you create the Illustrator file.

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