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In previous versions of After Effects, converting vector graphics from an Illustrator file
to After Effects shape layers was a very tedious process
requiring much manual copying and pasting of paths.
In After Effects CS6, this process is automatic.
Let's see how it's done.
Start in the Importing Project and go to File, Import, File,
and choose Aquo_Logo.ai from the footage folder.
Click OK.
Let's create a new composition based on this item
by dragging it down to the New Composition icon.
And I'll decrease the magnification a bit so that we can see the entire thing
on this relatively small display.
And I'll RAM preview even though this is a still
just so that you can see that it is in fact static.
What we want to do is use some of the auto animating wiggles from Shape Layers
to animate these logos.
Right click or Control click on Mac OS and choose Create Shapes from Vector Layer.
This will take a few seconds depending on the complexity of the Illustrator file.
And there we go.
We now have an Aquo Logo Outlines shape layer.
The visibility switch for it, the eyeball switch, is active
and After Effects has turned off the visibility switch for the Illustrator layer.
It assumes that we don't want to use this anymore, but it's still present in case we do.
I'll go ahead and delete it from the composition by selecting it and hitting Delete.
There. Now let's do something relatively simple--and perhaps a little bit garish--
by causing all of the paths in this shape layer to wiggle.
Select Contents, then choose from the Add menu Wiggle Transform.
After Effects adds the wiggle transform group
at the bottom of all of the groups containing the paths.
Notice that there are quite a lot of them.
This would have been a lot of tedious copying and pasting of paths
if we have 194 of them in here.
I'll scroll down a little bit, expand the wiggle transform group,
and I'll actually leave those values at their defaults.
And it's here in Transform where we tell After Effects
which of the transformation properties to wiggle or randomize.
Let's wiggle the position just a little bit--by 5 in the Y and 5 in the X--
and let's also have it wiggle the scale by 5%.
So now the maximum deviation for the wiggle will be 5 pixels in any direction
and the maximum variation in scale will be 5%.
And let's go ahead and RAM preview this.
Click the RAM Preview button.
And there.
Every path in the entire shape layer is being wiggled independently,
moving in both position and scale.
I'll press the accent key with the mouse pointer over the Composition panel to maximize it.
I'll increase the magnification to 100%,
and let's start the RAM preview again.
This time I'll press the 0 on the numeric keypad to start RAM preview.
Well, that's a little extreme, but you can definitely see the result.
I'll press the accent key again to return the panel to its regular size.
Note that not all features in Illustrator are supported for conversion into After Effects.
For example, gradients may come over as 50% gray,
and partial transparency defined in Illustrator is not converted over into After Effects.
So you may end up with completely opaque regions
where you expected partial transparency because of the Illustrator opacity settings.
As mentioned before, the conversion can be a little bit slow sometimes.
So if you have an Illustrator file with thousands of paths,
After Effects may take a while to convert those.
As you can see, it's now much easier to convert vector graphics from Illustrator files
into shape layers in After Effects.
