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Guym20
Inspiring
March 23, 2020
Answered

Turning a flat graphic to a circle

  • March 23, 2020
  • 7 replies
  • 4776 views

Hi

I want to turn a scene of a flat street into a round street (similar to a globe).

I want to avoid animating each element separately by reposition and rotating each one accurately.

How is that possible?

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer Rick Gerard

CC Bend It is a reasonable and quick option. It will distort the tops of your buildings. 

 

If you want to keep the proportions you can animate a straight line into a curve then use the Create Nulls from Paths> Nulls follow points panel to attach nulls to each of the points on the animated line. You can then add each of your illustrations (trees and buildings) as a separate layer, place the anchor point at the bottom center of the illustrations, then Shift + parent them to the appropriate nulls to snap them into the proper position. The easiest thing to do then is to just keyframe rotation for each of the drawings. If you don't ease the keyframes then that animation is really easy and will only take two keyframes.

 

Now that you have the drawing animated you can pre-compose the entire thing and enable time remapping to ease in and out of the transformation. I've done this a couple of dozen times over the last couple of years. It's pretty straight forward and the points follow nulls script makes it easy.

7 replies

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Anonymous
April 18, 2020

I TAKE IT YOUR TRYING TO DO IT  ON A COMPUTER AND THE 

R
Community Expert
Rick GerardCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
Community Expert
April 1, 2020

CC Bend It is a reasonable and quick option. It will distort the tops of your buildings. 

 

If you want to keep the proportions you can animate a straight line into a curve then use the Create Nulls from Paths> Nulls follow points panel to attach nulls to each of the points on the animated line. You can then add each of your illustrations (trees and buildings) as a separate layer, place the anchor point at the bottom center of the illustrations, then Shift + parent them to the appropriate nulls to snap them into the proper position. The easiest thing to do then is to just keyframe rotation for each of the drawings. If you don't ease the keyframes then that animation is really easy and will only take two keyframes.

 

Now that you have the drawing animated you can pre-compose the entire thing and enable time remapping to ease in and out of the transformation. I've done this a couple of dozen times over the last couple of years. It's pretty straight forward and the points follow nulls script makes it easy.

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Guym20Author
Inspiring
April 1, 2020

Thanks Rick, that's a great solution, thank you!

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David Arbor
Inspiring
March 31, 2020

I see. Well I'm glad you solved it. It would be helpful for others who come across this if you posted your solution. If this isn't what you did, you could use CC Bend It to accomplish this which will well...bend or warp a layer, rather than wrap it around an option. In the top image I have five layers of the running icon and one shape layer of a straight line. The second image is in the same comp, but there's an Adjustment Layer at the top of the stack with CC Bend It activated. This allows you to keep everything in one comp and toggle the bend when you want, but you could also have pre-composed the animation and then applied CC Bend It to that pre-comp. You have to play with the Start and End parameters to fold the layer just right, then I also set the "Distort" mode to "Extended" so the circle connected to itself. With the default option of "Legal" the orange circle doesn't close and you would have to bend the layer more, which would cause more distortion.

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Guym20Author
Inspiring
March 31, 2020

Thank you, but it isn't what I'm looking for. Sorry for not being clear enough

Anyway, I manually solved it. Here's what I meant:

 

 

 

Thanks!

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David Arbor
Inspiring
March 29, 2020

Can you be more specific with what you're trying to do, or show a similar example? You mentioned a globe which is what the CC Sphere effect is going to accomplish, but as this isn't what you're looking to do I'm not sure I understand. How can a sphere (which is an inherently 3D object) be wrapped around the Z-Axis but remain 2D, that sounds contradictory, but an example might help me understand. Are you by any chance talking about just bending a plane in 3D space, if so, check out CC Cylinder. That won't wrap your layer around a sphere, but will instead wrap it around a cylinder that doesn't close, so it looks like it's rolling up your flat layer like a piece of paper.

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Guym20Author
Inspiring
March 29, 2020

Thanks, but it didn't give the effect I hoped for.

I want the sphere to be wrapped around the Z axis and stay 2D, rather than wrapping it around the X axis and turnning it into a 3D sphere (which is what CC sphere does)

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David Arbor
Inspiring
March 23, 2020

Check out the CC Sphere effect. It's best if your flat art has a 2:1 aspect ratio so it wraps nicely around the sphere.

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