Animate along path offsets path

[Team Castle]

Attempting to animate a car along a path. Offset issue is occuring for me.

I have a car I am trying drive along a path but when I paste the path, it is offset from the original.

All layers are made in Illustrator and imported in After Effects.

I also selected "Create shapes from vector layers" after import.

Goal is to copy the path of Layer 2

Also, any way for the car to start at a particular anchor point along the path? Happy to answer any additional questions, thank you.

Layer 1 is the car

Layer 2 is the path (which is indentical to the path of the road below)

Layer 3 is the road / background

[Sonidos5C59]

Something similar happens to me, on my website soundsrelajantes.net I try to animate the backgrounds of the landscapes in my videos and I can't find a solution, I need help to do it in a simple way

[OussK]

Select all the keyframes and move them where you want,

[Team Castle]

Appreciate the video, any way to not have to guess for the alignment to the track? Also having to repeat the process for each car I add.

[P.M.B]

Why would you have to guess?  When you select the keyframes you should see the path in the comp window.  I'm assuming you can see the "track" it has to follow so you just align it to it.  

As for having to repeat it for every car:  No..add all your cars first the will all be consistently offset.  So once theyre all added select them all, hit p to expose the position keyframes of all of them and then align them all at once.

BTW way the CTI must be directly ON a keyframe or when you drag the paths in the Comp window you will ad an additional keyframe and screw everything up...even worse then you already have 🙂  (:P  Just kidding).  I think it's pretty stupid that people so smart put the xy origin in the center for shape layers and in the corner for all others.

What a bunch of silly geese.

Or!   Just draw a new path right in AE and forget the one you mad in Ai.  Shouldn't take all of 5 minutes.  

There's value in doing things thinhgs the hard way.  

[Team Castle]

I can see the track and can align it when zoomed it, just looking for a more precise way, if there is one.

Also, I will add each car then change the position of the offset to align to the track, good suggestion.

Drawing a new path, sure, but gotta be a better way. Each time I have a new track, I have to redraw it in after effects, looking to avoid this.

[Mylenium]

It's easy enough to generate a centered track from outlines in Illustrator and in reverse it's easy enough to convert a stroke to an outline and/ or further mangle it with the Offset Path functions. Of course all of this can only get you so far and you'll always have to put in some manual work, regardless whether that's in AI or AE. There are simply limitations. Still, I can't see why this is supposed to be a problem. Compared to other stuff people do in AE your track is simple and even if you had to do it for a hundred tracks it would still be doable by hand. Sounds to me like you're looking for a silver bullet solution that simply does not and cannot exist.... Rigging up the cars is of course a different matter. This could easily be automated using expressions and fancied up to a point where it almost behaves like a game, but you'd still have to paste in the motion path somewhere for the data to be accessible by the expressions.

Mylenium

[Team Castle]

I understand I may have to put some more time into the actual path aspect but I'm interested in what your mentioning about fancing it up. What are some of your favorite automated / expressions that could be helpful to me? Behaving like a game sounds awesome but, as you pointed out, my file is quiet simple, so what would you recommend? Thanks

[Mylenium]

You might want to read the online help or watch a tutorial on the basics. Shape layer coordinates start in the center of the image, regular layers have their origin in the top left corner. It's never been any different. If you copy & paste back and forth you need to keep this in mind and simply move the mask in place. This little tool also handles it automatically:

https://aescripts.com/copymask2layer/

Mylenium

[Team Castle]

This is not basic, my friend. Hence you linked a $9.99 add-on that you needed to make it work. Not a solution.