Animated Urban Plan in After Effects

This is what we usually like to do when we want to level up our online presentations in these pandemic times. We know that some teachers are still old school and they just want to see printed site plans, etc. But, they also have to get used to what is going on right now.

So, if you run out of ideas when doing your presentation, then check out this tutorial that aside from being extremely easy, can also make your presentation stand out from the rest. Watch the video tutorial here.

Final Animated Urban Plan

Layer each element in Adobe Illustrator

We open the urban plan in illustrator, and what we do is fix it up a little bit. We have different layers of elements in our plan, so we are going to separate them

It took us a while to fix up the plan, we also changed the colors of the grass area, and we made sure to separate the layer groups and leave each element on its own.

After effects

After saving your file as Ai, we opened after effects and created a new composition. This depends on which size you are working with.

Go to the folder where you have your Ai file and just drag it into after effects. You can see your file in the after effects panel and all of its layers.

That black background was looking a little weird, so we added a new solid layer, and we selected white.

Start animating

We are going to start animating the clouds, but first, we will make this vector into a shape. So standing in the clouds layer, we right-click and choose “create shapes from vector layer”

Click p on your keyboard so you can see the position option. Now, we are going to move the clouds, so we move them to the right then we drag the handle to the 10-sec mark, after doing this we move the clouds to the left. Make sure that the stopwatch button it´s blue. When it’s blue you know that it is already making the animation. After doing this, press the space bar to play and see the animation.

We want this urban plan to have an animation, but also for it to be a little bit realistic and not a plain animation. So we added some drop shadows to the clouds. Standing on the clouds layer, we chose the drop shadow option.

Of course, this works like photoshop, so you can change the opacity, the spacing, and the size of the shadow.

We also created a shape from the vector of the river, we did the same step as we did with the clouds, but with this, we also selected “make trim paths”

and in the “trim paths” drop-down menu, we are going to make the river appear at the same time is passing by. So in the “end” button, we put the opacity to 0%, we then drag the handle to the 10-sec mark, and then we put the opacity to 100%.

Finally, we added the text and it’s basically the same steps as the other animations. You can see that after-effects has different types of animations to choose from. So we wanted also the text to appear.

Final Animated Urban Plan