Working with multiple Ai artboards for animation in Ae

Question

Hi, I am working on creating an animation that has various parts. This is my first time using after affects. I have already made artboards or various scenes from the animation in illustrator. Now I am trying to import these files into Ae for animation.

1. Which is the best way to import files? Should I make a new Ai file for each artboard or should I import the file that contains all the artboards?

2. I tried both versions, but when I open them in Ae the file that contains all artboards only show one of the artboards that I can edit, and when I open individual file, I see the individual file, but for some reasons I cannot select the elements.

Can anyone guide me towards an animation that is made using multiple Ai artboards?

Thanks in advance

Wen346272266ahy · Accepted Answer

my suggestion is to draw a bigger artboard to cover all of the artboards. then set this big artboard as the second in the sequence. then AE will only recognize this big artboard(AE only recognize the second one of the sequence, I don't know the reason). next, you can import the shapes correctly.

thepixelsmith · Answer

In general AE doesn't do well with multiple artboards from Illustrator.

Usually I use the option in ILlustrator's Save As to export each artboard as a separate file. It's on the secondary menu that pop up when you save an Ai file.

I then import the AI files into AE using the Composition (Retain Layer Sizes) option. This will convert the AI file into an AE composition and each layer from AI into a layer in AE.

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