We cannot really talk about importing without showing some of Adobe’s products and the ways to set up your source locations. Also, remember source location is a key factor for After Effects. The file pack is going to show where you have saved or where you have stored your source materials. As an after fact seizure probably the most common applications that are used are Adobe’s Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.
Setting up the files in Photoshop is fairly simple. I’ll go ahead and launch Photoshop and open up a document that I have already prepared and the file pull down menu, I will go to open and in chapter 3 in the Photoshop folder, I will open up the Flig document. Here, notice the Flig is set up with many different layers. Each one of these layers has a name that I have given it in Photoshop. This is very important because After Effects will recognize the name from Photoshop and use that when I import this later on.
Also, it is very easy to see in Photoshop that each one of this is a separate layer. If I switch over to illustrator and create a new document, I will use COMMAND+TAB to switch over to Illustrator on the mac or CONTROL+TAB on the PC. In the new document dialog, I will just click OKAY.
Now, I am not going to go over the basics of Illustrator, if you want to find that more about Photoshop or Illustrator check out the other series from total training. Here, I just want to demonstrate how easy it might be to confuse layers for groups in Illustrator. In Illustrator we will create sample shape by clicking here and creating a shape. Again, I will click here but choose a different shape to illustrate it is a different path. Although, they might look like they are separate layers, these two elements are actually in one layer.
Here I can see both paths even though I might change the names of these paths, they are still in layer one. In order for After Effects to see this as discrete layers, I need to make a new layer and moving there one of this onto its own layer. Now, I can double click and rename the layer and After Effects will not only recognize these as two separate layers when I import them but it will also recognize the name that I have given the Illustrator layers. Where you save these files, is also as important as how you create the files.
Remember, After Effects is going to locate this according to the file path, so for convenience, when I save this, I will save this to an Illustrator folder where I keep my project files. We would not need this file because we have already prepared an Illustrator file for this lesson. So, on a Mac, I’ll simply close this document by clicking on this small red dot, we are using COMMAND+W to close it out, on a PC you will use CTRL+W. Illustrator asked me, do I want to save it? No. Having closed that, I will navigate to the finder using command Tab on the Mac.
Again, remember it is ALT+TAB on the PC, navigate to where you have the project files for this chapter and you will find all of the different folders or the files that you might use for a project such as this. You have gone over this before and I want to show you that I have got Illustrator and Photoshop as primary folders for source materials. You can setup your own folder to conform to the different projects or files that you might use in your project.
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