I am quite proud of how the building turned out once I had created it in Illustrator. I felt that the design looked very professional and I have definitely improved on my Illustrator skills since my first year at University. We then had to save the illustrator file in a specific way by expanding the Illustrator art board so that the edges would keep in the design that your working with within the art board area. If the edges or images are off the art board you would have to make sure that the design fits within the page, by modifying this so that it is bigger than the HD. We had to then go to document setup > edit art board > and drag out the corners, so that it would cover the images outside of the art board. To save the design, I had to follow the process of save as > new name which was Enlarged extended version, after I had done this the Illustration was then ready to be imported into after effects.
I then opened the programme After Effects, where I was then able to import my Illustrator file, by using file > import > single file. Before importing the design into After Effects, I need ed to make sure that the format kind was selected as Composition and this was at layer size. To add the layers of the Illustrator file into the timeline I had to double click on the composition, so that this would transport into the bottom menu which was the timeline.
After we had done this I then had to create a new composition, by following the process composition > new composition. Before pressing ok, I needed to make sure that the settings for the new composition were correct by naming the comp, as Main composition, the width and height needed to be 1920px by 1080px, the preset had to be HDTV 1080 25, the frame rate per second at 25 and finally the duration to 10 seconds long. We were then ready to select ok.
We then had to drop the visible layers onto the main comp, however to do this we had to do this in a certain way by selecting all of the layers in the Illustrator comp and copying and pasting them into the main comp by using two keyboard shortcuts cmd + c and cmd + v. After we had done this we then had to look at the switched by doing this I had to select the "toggle switches/modes" option in the timeline and select the cube option which activated the 3D option after this we had to make sure that this option had been selected for every layer.
Furthermore into this we then looked at the position where I had to make sure that the value for Z was changed to 0 for every layer. I learnt that if you use a minus value it moves the design closer, but if you use a plus value it moves the design further away. We then selected the 2 Views horizontal that allowed me to work with the camera and Z space a lot better. To work with the Z space, we had to stagger the objects, so that they were selected and offset slightly in the Z space on the left hand side of the screen. However I had to make sure that there was enough space between the objects so that the camera pan through the design easier. To move the lines we had to use the blue arrows.
In addition to this we had to create a new camera by following the process of Layer > New > Camera. I had to make sure that the camera that I selected was a 50mm camera which was a 2 node camera, before selecting ok, I had to enable the depth of field at the end. To use the camera in the composition, I had to select the position and the point of interest and change the position to more where the camera was already positioned on the screen. The point of interest was to change the angle of where the points were. I then had to create 2 key frames at the beginning of the timeline where the the camera was on the top of top view and the other one at the bottom, which was at the end.
We were then able to use the camera tool to do this I had to select the layer and use the keyboard letter U, to show all of the keyframes that I was going to be working with. We were then introduced to motion path, where I had to select the keyframe which you could only see some of the motion path. We then had to go to preferences > display > all keyframes > ok. the keyframes for both position and the point of interest would then show, I was then able to use one of the tools to move the position of the point in the top of the camera section. I had to make sure that the speed and the motion of the animation looked and worked correctly. I found that adding more keyframes meant that the camera did more work, to change the direction or the path of the camera, I had to use the bezier tool. However I felt that this didn't work with my design so I decided to keep the design the same.
We then moved on to look at importing some textures into the after effects programmes, the textures that I decided to use for my design were a Ice Texture for the sky and a brick texture for part of the building. For the texture to work I had to make sure that this was applied to the correct layer and the overlay mode was changed to multiply. I also decided to add a page turn to some of the layers that I had created, to do this I used the cc page turn tool option and changed the positioning of some of the layers so that the layer would fold upwards. I was very happy with this process and production lesson after I finally got the hang of it.
