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oskarigeo
oskarigeo
Participating Frequently
October 23, 2017
Question

How to bake in / flatten a shape transformation?

  • October 23, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 6890 views

I've got a comp that animates the Skew transformation property on a Shape layer content group. Everything looks great, but my problem is that the animation is to be used by the Lottie animation library, and Lottie does not support Skew transformations.

The only way I can think to get around this is to "bake in" the Skew transformation frame-by-frame, so that the shape actually "flattens" to be in the shape of the Skew in each frame, while the actual Skew transformation is zeroed out. Something similar in behaviour to the Expand / Expand Appearance functionalities in Illustrator?

I tried Auto-Trace, but the results aren't very desirable.

Is what I'm describing possible in After Effects? If so, how?

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    2 replies

    Mylenium
    Mylenium
    Legend
    October 23, 2017
    Is what I'm describing possible in After Effects? If so, how?

    Not using your method. You would have to use a normal recatngle pathe and animate its shape.

    Mylenium

    oskarigeo
    oskarigeoAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    October 24, 2017

    Mylenium  wrote

    You would have to use a normal recatngle pathe and animate its shape.

    The problem is, many of my shapes are a lot more complex than a simple rectangle, so manually editing the path isn't very feasible.

      oskarigeo
      oskarigeoAuthor
      Participating Frequently
      October 25, 2017

      This will show you how to use blends in Illustrator to create animations.

      It would help me help you to see your AE project with the modified properties of the shape layer revealed. Just press the U key twice.


      Hey Rick,

      That looks like a very interesting technique! I'm sure that will come in useful.

      However, it doesn't look like you have much control over easing with this method, so it might not be appropriate for my use case.

      Here's the modified properties;

      The Position, Scale and Rotation properties are properly picked up by Lottie. However, I suppose they would all need to be zeroed out and "flattened" into the Shape Path for the technique I'm looking for to work properly.

      Any suggestions are welcome!

      Szalam
      Community Expert
      SzalamCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      October 23, 2017

      I do not know of a way to do what you are asking. It might be something that could be scripted, but I haven't seen a script made for this yet. You might check over on AEscripts.com though. You might contact some authors of other shape layer scripts to see how doable this would be.

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