I am new to After Effects, and I am trying to make an Animation that is a bit hard for my poor skills. I made a Trim Path, and now I want to transform the "form" that follows it into an ellipse shape. Is that possible?
1 Answer
This is quite a tricky one, because one shape is open and the other (the ellipse) is closed. Usually I would take one shape, turn it into bezier curves, add a keyframe to it, then do the same to another shape, then copy one keyframe from the first shape into the other shape to allow it to morph between the two. But with one open and one closed shape that won't work.
So in this case, I think I would make a guide ellipse shape first, and make it a different colour to my spiral shape.
Then make the spiral shape on a new layer, above the ellipse.
Set the spiral shape to bezier, and make sure both shapes have a shape position transform of 0,0.
Then add a keyframe to the spiral shape, and a second keyframe later on, which we'll use to match the ellipse.
Go to the second keyframe, and add some guide rulers to exactly line up where the centre of each ellipse point is, as shown:
Make sure Snap to Guides and Lock Guides are both enabled in the View menu.
Then lock your ellipse layer, and select your spiral layer.
Go through one by one, making sure the points manually are positioned to hide the ellipse layer: