Animating 2 blended Illustrator shapes

[johnf35366569]

Hi

I have a simple graphic made up in Illustrator of two outlined shapes that blend in 10 steps from one shape to another. It both changes colour and line thickness. How can I go about animating this in AE and create a fluid 3D motion effect of turning inside out, twisting, rotating and manipulating each of the paths to create new shapes. I'm just learning and not sure where to start looking on how to do this or even if its possible in AF. Any step by step info would really help. Thanks

[Mylenium]

This can pretty much only be done the hard way in vanilla AE. You have to expand your blend, import the artwork, convert it to shape layers and then re-assign individual strokes. Then you'd animate the individual anchor points of the paths. The other option would be spending money on a plug-in called Plexus and re-creating everything there. It has a blend effector and can create such scenarios easily, but will cost you 300 bucks extra. Between those two extremes you may be able to find alternate workflows like creating multiple differently shaped blends in AI, expanding them again and pasting the paths as keyframes at different times into the existing shape path. Likewise, there's a number of mask utility scripts on AEScripts.com that can help with interpolation and smoothing, but some of those cost a few bucks as well. So you basically can do all of what you want, it's just not going to be as simple as creating a blend in AI.

Mylenium

[samg38341640]

Hi John, 

Did you have any luck with this? I'm trying to do the exact same thing, trying to find shortcuts instead of creating a thousand frames manually!  Thanks

[Rick Gerard]

I came up with this workflow a few years ago. Maybe it will help:

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