Tag: Workinprogress

Professional Practice in Motion Animation

Leaves & Flower Draw in Adobe Illustrator

During the production of my ‘Canary’ film, I tried to use After Effect to create a dynamic effect. I drew the flowers and leaves in Adobe Illustrator I and then imported them into After Effect to create the swaying leaves.

Progress in After Effect

Because I didn’t consider layering in AI, I had to use pins in AE to make the leaves skeletal and wobbly, which was quick and easy to do, but the downside was that you couldn’t look at them closely and there were some rigid movements.

Fortunately, the shot is only a few seconds long and is presented as a background rather than a subject, so the final result is satisfactory.


If you need to create a leaf-swaying animation like this in the future, you should try to avoid too many layers in the drawing process, as this will greatly reduce the speed of your computer and will affect your final film.

Working with LIAF project – Blender

Regarding this involvement in the animation of the LIAF short film, my main task was to convert the 2D drawing into a 3D effect and give smooth camera movement, and participate in the animation of some bubbles.

The biggest problem I have faced would be how to make the two-dimensional image look three-dimensional and allow the camera to enter the scene.

At this stage I tried three ways to deal with this problem:

  1. After Effect
  2. Monocular Depth Estimation
  3. Blender
  • The first method that came to mind was to use AE to map a flat surface into a cube, but this did not produce the desired effect and the camera was only able to make some simple movements, which was not the ideal effect we wanted.

Creating a cube in AE can only move a tiny angle in camera
  • The second way is to calculate the depth of the image and then imported it into blender, I used blender to create a depth-of-field effect into the image. The results of this image also waste most of the surrounding background and only allow for small movements.
  • Finally, I find the solution which is to import the illustration as a solid plane into Blender, and then I used the knife tool to go around with the rock shape and manually create a 3d feel for the image in the form of sheets. That works pretty well.
This is the line view looks like