Animating wavey circle path

[amurray93]

I am trying to animate the borders of this smiley to look like they are moving around the face. would anyone know of a good trick to make it look like the border waves of the smiley are moving along the oval shape of the smiley?

I am working with a live Ilustrator file and the paths haven't been expanded.

[Mylenium]

Ditch the AI, file, rebuild it in AE. It's as simple as that. You can't aexpect AE to do anything with your file if you're not even willing to expand it and convert it e.g. to shape layer paths. that just makes zero sense. Once you have a native path, the dents could easily be created with a Pucker & Bloat shape modifier and animated with a path offset or simply rotating and squeezing a path.

Mylenium

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

I would make the outside round instead of an oval. You could do it with a shape layer and just apply ZigZag/Round corners. Then you could rotate it and add the transform effect to squeeze it in Y. Something like this:

The other option is to make sure that your Illustrator artwork is separated into layers and that the outside oval is a simple stroked line. Import as a comp, convert only the outside to a shape layer and then animate the bezier paths. 

I don't know any easy way to animate that zig-zag oval unless it is round first. 

[amurray93]

Thanks! Simple and worked perfectly.