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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
  • 6885 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?

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    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
      November 7, 2017

      Hi Oskarigeo,

      Which technique did you end up using? Please let us know.

      Thanks,
      Kevin


      Hey Kevin,

      I tried fiddling around with the Auto-Trace settings, and got a not-awful-looking result after scaling the comp up to 400% and then pre-composing it to scale it back down to 100%, in order to hide the smaller imperfections.

      However, the resulting JSON file from bodymovin was 1.4 megabytes in size (normally seeing something closer to 50kb), and had severe performance issues on both iOS and Android, so it was not usable.

      If someone knows of a technique to do what I originally laid out, I am still very much interested!

      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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