When a single designer is creating many boards for a video, they often utilize the Artboards feature in either Illustrator or Photoshop. As an animator receiving designs in this fashion, there exists no simple way to import them into After Effects in a useful way.
Both Illustrator and Photoshop have "Artboards to Files" workflows, but that's not ideal because it creates redundant versions of the artwork. This can complicate folder structures, take up filespace, and cause the opportunity for conflicting versions as changes are made. In essense, this workflow goes against what artboards are for in the first place!
The proposed solution is an additional option in the dialog that appears when importing Ps/Ai files to select which artboard should be imported. This should include:
- [Each Artboard by Name and Index] - Imports a layer or composition the exact size of the selected artboard.
- All Artboards - All artboards are imported in as a single large layer or composition. In contrast to the existing Ps functionality, when Retain Layer Sizes is selected, each artboard should be imported as a comp of its appropriate size, NOT the document size.
Note that this would work in tandem with the existing Footage / Composition options. Some thought will have to go into how this interacts with the Layer options for importing an individual layer. Here's a stab at it:
- Import Kind: Footage / Composition
- Import Scope: Document (Default) / Artboard / Layer
- Selection: [Each Artboard / Layer] (If Scope is Document this would be disabled)
- Size: Document / Artboard / Layer(s)
- Layer Options: Editable Layer Styles / Merge Layer Styles into Footage (Ps Only)
If the team takes on a revision of the importer, here are several other options that would be useful:
- Convert all text to text layers (Ps & Ai)
- Convert all vectors to shape layers (Ai)
- Unembed & Import Linked Images (I can't overstate how nice this would be.) (Ps & Ai)
- Ignore Non-Overlapping Artwork (Actually eliminate from the layer stack any layers/groups not seen by the selected artboard) (Ps & Ai)
- Duration & Framerate (Ps & Ai)
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