Animating EPS Files in RED

One of RED's most powerful features is its vector animation capabilities. Native vector text, a library of spline primitive shapes, powerful control over stroke and fill, and true vector masks are just a very few of the elements that make RED the most extensive vector animation application ever offered.

A fact of life for video editors is working with client-supplied artwork that, to put it charitably, may be less than appropriate for your current needs. The classic example is an Adobe Illustrator file that looked just fine when it was used to create a logo on a business card, but just won't do for video.

You don't need to panic, and you don't need Illustrator or any other graphics application to get you out of your jam. You just need Boris RED.

Now that I think about it, for this tutorial you'll also need an Illustrator file, so I've provided one for you here.

It's our actual logo, and is a perfect "illustrator" of both the kinds of limitations you can have with files designed for print, and how RED can overcome them.

While it's especially cool to be able to use Illustrator files in your NLE, I'm going to build this particular effect in the standalone RED Engine. Once I've built and saved it in the standalone, I could then of course open it in any of the twenty NLEs that RED supports, but I'm working in the standalone for one reason and one reason only - the brick background that serves as the proxy file for your NLE's Video 2 makes a dandy reflection map.

We have a few steps to get from the first illustration to the second…but not that many, and more easily than you can imagine.

I'll note as we begin that there are other effects applications, and at least a couple of NLEs, that let you use Illustrator files directly. But none of them can do all of what we're about to do here. Only RED.

Once inside the RED Engine, set the duration of your timeline to 1 second. Delete the V1 track, park your CTI at the beginning of the effect, and press the shortcut button marked EPS.

This is short for Encapsulated PostScript, and is one of the file types saved by vector applications like Illustrator. (RED can also read documents saved in the .ai format. I have more details for you about that at the end of this tutorial.) Navigate to the file you downloaded, and bring it into RED.

You can see right away that there's really not much to work with here. The file isn't anywhere near ready for prime time, but that's easily remedied. The first order of business is to select the Shape track (the topmost layer) for our EPS file, and, from the Track menu, select Convert to Container.

This breaks the file up into the layers that were created in Illustrator, and places them both in a 3D container. As a result, we'll be able to treat the layers individually, without sacrificing the ability to move the entire file as a single object. This is a very nice distinction from other applications, which force unnecessary choices. And of course, nicer still than applications that don't allow you to use vector applications at all.

Notice that the two tracks in the Container have been named Boris and RED. Those are the names provided in the Illustrator file. If I'd kept the names of the layers Layer 1 and Layer 2 (Illustrator's default), that's what we'd be seeing in RED now.

Let's work on each layer individually, beginning with the one that needs most work, the Boris layer. Start by clicking the "eye" icon to turn off the visibility of the RED track. Then use the Media pop-up menu under the EPS icon for the Boris track to convert the layer to a Spline Object.

A couple of quick clicks. The red button on the Controls window discloses and selects the track containing the paths that comprise "Boris."

That shortcut also brings up the Tool window. Use the Hollow Arrow tool to select one of the paths in the Composite window, then use command-A (Mac)/control-A (Win) to select all of them.

Back in the Controls window, click on the Border tab, where our first hurdle comes plainly into view.

Half of a pixel. That's the width of the stroke in this file.

Now that's perfectly reasonable for a print document, but you can imagine the havoc that would ensue if we tried putting a half-pixel line out to video. Fortunately, it's easily changed. Simply type the number 4 in that box and press enter. Already we have something usable, and with no trouble at all getting there.

Let's go to the Fill tab, and check the box to turn it on. There wasn't any fill in the Illustrator file, but literally only one click to add it. We can also adjust the fill, of course, and so we shall.

First, set the interpolation for the color to Constant. Then click on the eyedropper next to the color chip, and select yellow from the color swatch at the bottom of the Controls window.

We haven't animated anything yet, but let's do that now.

For example, the Fill opacity. Simply type in zero and press enter. If you've left your default interpolation at Ease In/Out, you're done. Otherwise, use the pop-up to set it to that now.

Back on the Border tab, type zero in the Border End box, and press enter.

You should see nothing onscreen as the effect begins, but as you Preview to RAM (Preview menu> Preview to RAM), you'll find the opacity animating up, and the border drawing itself on.

One more quick change and we'll be finished with this layer. Select its Shape Track, the topmost track that also has the name Boris.

It's critical to make sure that your CTI is back at the beginning of the timeline now. If it's not, just press your keyboard's Home key.

Then on the Position tab in the Controls window, type -45 degrees followed by Enter in both the Tumble and Spin boxes.

Head to the Shadow tab, turn on the drop shadow, and preview again.

You'll see several things happen at once. We made a variety of changes at the path level of the layer, adjusting stroke and adding fill and animating both, then made a few more changes to the entire layer's orientation. Boris makes it very easy to work on both levels, animating both the layer and the elements within the layer.

Just for grins, also note that the shadow's opacity animates as the fill's opacity animates. It really couldn't get much easier than this.

We're done with the Boris layer for now, so we can turn off its visibility, and turn on the RED layer. Once again, we'll want to expose and animate its vector paths, so, as we did before, let's convert the EPS file to a Spline Object. Let's also change the kind of layer it is, converting it to a 3D Extrusion.

That's really all there is to creating a 3D object in RED: one pop-up menu. Note that plenty of other applications can extrude an Illustrator outline. In other tutorials you've seen how easy it is to extrude actual TEXT, which remains editable and animatable as TEXT. This offers huge advantages.

In this case, we're working in the context of a provided logo element. So even if this weren't text, we'd be fine as long as we have a vector outline to start with.

Because RED has the power to create its own vector elements, including stroke and fill as we saw in the previous section, we can easily add new ones to existing files.

Again, it's critical to have your CTI at the beginning of the effect.

Once you do, use the red button in the Controls button to expose and select RED's Face track, which you'll see is called Silhouette instead of Path. That's to indicate that while there is indeed an editable path there, you'll be seeing the results of your edits in three dimensions.

Now select the Oval tool from the Tool window. We'll click-drag to create a new oval that surrounds the word RED. Look at the illustration below to see what I mean.

After drawing the oval, select the Hollow Arrow tool, which selects the freshly drawn path. Now just have use the standard keyboard shortcut for Select All to have selected all four paths in the scene: the oval and the three letters.

Under the Tools menu, you'll find the command for joining all of these vector paths into a single object: Tools> Path> Combine Contours.

The path we've added joins with the text to create a new object, an oval with text cut out of it.

That's the kind of control that you expect to see in a vector application, and we have it here in three dimensions.

Just as we did for the first layer, we made a bunch of changes to the vector information in the file, and now we're going to make changes to the layer's geometry. Click on RED's topmost track, the Shape track, and let's give our new shape some color.

Select the Materials tab, and set the Color interpolation to Constant, them change the color to red (naturally enough). You'll see that the edges of the layer are still white, and if you turned the object around, you'd see that the back was too. That's because you can separately apply different materials to the front, extrusion, bevels and back of the object. In this case, we want only one Material, not four of them, so set the Face Count pop-up to one.

We can of course edit the extrusion, so let's do that too. Change the depth to 3, the bevel to .3, and turn on Back Bevels.

Depending on your screen resolution, you may need to scroll one more panel to the right in order to see the Shadow tab, but let's turn on the drop shadow there as well.

We haven't yet animated any parameters, so let's go back to the Position tab (the first one, all the way back to the left) and add a spin. Type the number one for revolutions, and set the interpolation to Linear.

Preview to RAM. You'll see the 3D oval spinning as pretty as you please.

A couple of finishing touches. I mentioned reflection maps earlier. Let's add one here.

With the Shape track selected, you'll see a blue shortcut button on the Controls window. Click that to add a Reflection Map.

Nothing much changes, but take a quick trip back to the Materials tab and you'll see why. The default material is a plastic, with just enough reflectivity to pick up the scene lighting, and not much else. So enter a value of 90 and press enter.

Something's there, but what? Head down to the timeline, and take a look: it's V1. If you were working inside your NLE, that would probably be right. We'll change it to V2, though, to bring in the brick wall.

You may also want to adjust the red color you've used as the Material, perhaps make a bit lighter to bring up the reflection some more. That's up to you, and will vary depending on the precise value of the red you selected earlier. If you want to edit a color, it's easy: click on the red color chip to open your OS color picker.

To show off our nice reflection, let's tumble the object back a little, say, minus ten degrees, and set the interpolation to Constant.

Turn on the visibility of the Boris layer and preview to RAM. You'll see that even with a reflection map, the preview is pretty speedy. Note one of my favorites in RED's 3D feature set, the very realistic distortions of the reflection map in the spinning object. There are 3 distinct reflections - a broad one along the face, a smaller one on the extrusion, and one even smaller along the bevels. Very, very nice.

You'll also see that the RED object is in front of the Boris layer, cutting off the bottom of the B. Not so nice.

If you look at the timeline, you'll see why that's the case: the RED layer is on top. Illustrator, like most applications, adds new layers to the top so they'll be visible, but I want the layers in a different order. That's not a problem, because all it takes to reorder the layers is clicking and dragging them in any order that pleases us. It would please me to have the Boris layer in front, so let's click and drag it above the RED layer in the container.

That's all there is to it. Now the Boris logo is unobstructed, and casts its shadow back on the RED object.

I say "that's all there is to it," but let's review.

We took an Illustrator file and imported it with its layers. To one layer we added fill, edited stroke, animated them both, animated its 3D orientation and added a shadow. To the other, we added a new path and created a custom 3D object, added color and a reflection map, and animated it in 3D space with a shadow. Then we rearranged the layers.

All without adding a single keyframe!

That, in a nutshell, is the auto-animating power of Boris RED for 2D and 3D vector animation.

Now, you'll probably want to have some fun with your own Illustrator files and customer logos. Like most 3D applications, Boris RED supports files saved as Illustrator 8 or earlier. RED also currently supports only solid colors for stroke and fill - no gradients. There's no telling what might happen in future versions of either Illustrator or RED, but that's where we are today.

If all you want to do is to display your EPS file as a 2D object, and don't need any of the vector animation, you may want to display it not as 3D Line Art, but as a 3D Plane. This rasterizes the vectors to pixels, and for complex images, can result in significant performance boosts.

If you're working with 3D objects, don't forget that the normal rules apply. Working in Draft Mode brings in OpenGL. While it reduces quality, it increases speed. You can also display 3D objects as wireframes. This not only speeds workflow, but with larger objects can also be very pretty when rendered out.

There's simply no other application on the planet, at any price, that offers the range of 2D and 3D vector animation options found in Boris RED.

• Training Home
• Boris TV
• Tutorials
• Webinar Replays
• Training DVD's
• Training Centers
• Demo Scripts