Creating a multiple marker map animation

[christinas31581472]

I'd like to replicate the homepage map animation for this website - https://gbtrealty.com​. I seem to be stuck on the map animated portion at the end.

I've seen multiple tutorials on animated map routes and animating the map point itself but it's not quite what I'm working to accomplish. I'd like to take a multiple map point KML (or KMZ) exported from Google Maps and have one animation that simultaneously animates the map points as shown in the GBT video. I have two issues, I do not want to have to manually animate each and every dot. Additionally I'd like to pull the map date from an Network Linked KML.

Currently when I import the file from Google Earth Studio, the JSX files does not show up in After Effects. Additionally changing the KML file to a Shapefile (using QGIS) has been unsuccessful, no dots appear?

I have seen this can be done using the plugin GeoLayers but the plugin seems very costly. Any alternatives or tutorials out there to point me in the right direction?

[Mylenium]

It might help to adjust your mindset. AE is a graphics program, not a GIS data manager. Of course a coordinate point in a GIS program will not necessarily be represented as an actual dot anywhere. It's all handled parametrically inside those programs. None of that is AE's fault. You have to do a hard conversion in whatever form by exporting a DWG/ PDF or whatever and explicitly instructing your program to create visible entities. Likewise you can't expect AE to handle those formats natively nor the intermediate meta formats like KML. Ultimately that's the whole point of GeoLayers - if AE already did it, you wouldn't need the script/ plug-in. So no matter how you spin it, either you have to put in a lot of labour to create your own tools and manually animate stuff or just get over it and make your life easier by buying that little tool.

Mylenium

[Rick Gerard]

The no out-of-pocket cost option: Use whatever website or data you can to create an image that contains the points - import the image into Illustrator and use it as a guide for drawing the map and putting a bunch of dots on it. When you have the vector copy of your map with dots, which can all be on one layer then use the Release to Layere>Sequence available from the Layers Panel menu. Then drag all of the new layers above the original layer, delete the now empty original layer, and import into AE as a comp. You now have a comp with each dot on a separate layer and a map. It is a fairly simple task to write an expression that would animate the position, z position if you want to make the map 3D like in the example, all based on layer index and time. Write the expression, copy the expression or save it as an animation preset and apply it to all of the dot layers.  There you go. It would probably take me less than a couple of hours to do that from scratch for a single map with a couple of hundred dots on it.

If I had only one project to do like that, that's what I would do.

If I had one a month to do for the next few months and there were more than a hundred dots on the map I would buy the plug-in.

If you need some help with the expression let me know. I'll see if I can pull a rabbit out of a hat.

Edit: Here's the rabbit:

add a couple of sliders to a shape or vector layer with a dot at the center, name one of them Move In Frames, and the other one Clear Fraame, then add this expression to position:

// adjustments

st = time - inPoint;

moveIn = effect("Move In Frames")("Slider") * thisComp.frameDuration;

clrFrame = effect("Clear Frame")("Slider");

// end position

p = position;

x = p[0];

endy = p[1];

starty = p[1] - clrFrame; // move out of frame

z = p[2];

// create move

y = easeOut(st, 0, moveIn, starty, endy);

[x, y, z]

This will move a 3D layer in y to its original position from a starting position above the original position that is set by the Clear Frame slider and the move will take as many frames as you have set with Move In Slider. Then all you have to do is set values for the first dot save the expression and the effects as an Animation Preset, apply it to all the dots in your comp, then distribute the layers in the timeline so they fly in at the time you want.

You can modify the expression to control the length of a stroke to overlay for the glow or pre-compose and use echo, or a bunch of other things to complete the project.

Here's an animation preset that should work for any 3D layer: Dropbox - 3D DropIn on Y.ffx