[Released] After Effect Importer for Unity

Hello. I would like to present plugin for import 2D animation from Adobe After Effect to your Unity project. The plugin has full editor integration and tested on mobile devices.



Web Preview | Video Tutorial | Documentation | Available on Asset Store



Supported Features:

• All move interpolation methods
• Transform
• Rotation
• Position
• Pivot Position Change
• Parenting
• Additive Texture mixing
• Compositions

Benefits:

• Huge App Size and Ram saving
• You able to use Adobe After Effect as animation tool for 2D animation in your game

Importer Features:

• Optimized for mobile platfroms
• Open source code
• Example scenes and tutorial included

Version 1.1

• Fixed minor bugs
• Parsing Speed improved
• Animation performance improved

 

This AE to Unity is brilliant!
I have used AE for over 15 years and so glad to now be able to use this in relation to unity.

I imagine for procedural things in AE, just render them out and then bring them back into the composition...such as fractal cloud animation or...

Great job.

 

Thanks, pixelsteam.

All our animators work with AE, so that plugin is put our project to the next level. Workflow is better and we saving a lot of size and RAM.
As soon as I polished this plugin I decided to put in in asset store.

And I would love to get feedback, to make it even better.

 

Hello. Thanks for purchases.
Good news. New version is released.

* Fixed minor bugs
* Parsing Speed improved
* Animation performance improved

 

So, that means your plugin can export this?

 

99% that yes. But I have to see the project. It depends what tools author use to create this animation.

Until you using plugin supported features with is

• All move interpolation methods
• Transform
• Rotation
• Position
• Pivot Position Change
• Parenting
• Additive Texture mixing
• Compositions

You can export what ever you want. If you have any animation and you want to see how it looks like. Fell free to post it here or drop me PM. I'll do the web player preview with this exported animation. I'm not mach of an animation, so I can only make preview of some basic animation with using a lot of features. like this one in video tutorial.

 

Awesome!!! I like it.
Can your plugin work with particles After Effect ?

 

Hello. Thanks for purchase.
Not yet. To do this I should create some import like AE particles to unity particles. I will treat it like feature request and will think how to implement this. Thanks.

Currently I working on optimization and minor bug fixing. Next update should be live in asset store shortly.

 

this is pretty awesome!
I have one question tho, would it be possible to do it the other way around as well? Say you have a scene with tons of 3d planes for a 2d game, could this be transferred to aftereffects, to stage and animate sequences?

 

Hello. Thanks for your interest.
It dosen't work like this currently. You only can import animation form aftereffects, you can edit it and update in Unity.

But I do not see the way how to import your sprites to after effects. Point is when I'am importing animation from AE to Unity I use already prepared plane mesh to control all pivot and transform change.

To import for Unity to AE I need to know composition size, mesh pivtos, ect. Even if I will create something like this, it going to be very unstable. So currently I am not going to do this.

But as I sad if you already imported AE animation to Unity, you can continue to edit it in AE, and it will be updated in your editor after reimport.
Cheers!

 

Fixes:
Annoying Bug with animation rotation and gizmos drawing is now fixed.

Adding's:
New version contains add-on for using it with the Texture Packer Pro Unity Extension. It will help you reduce draw calls and save even more space and RAM!

Cheers!

 

Does this take into account the Z position or does it just automatically set that to 0?

 

All sprites have different Z position according to layer position in After Effect. It calculated automatically. If you need you can even change Z position step.


Also you can easily change position, rotation or scale of root game object, like you do with any else gameobect on your stage, it will not harm animation at all.

 

hello, wonder if in future it will be possible to use mask...and blending mode... that will be just awesome

 

Hello.
Additive blending is currently supported.

Not sure about mask, next step is implementing plane colors support.
Cheers!

 

awesome . but can i make afx comp in 3d can it also expert it z value?.

 

If you mean 3D camera in After Effect - no it's not supported.

About export z value. When you creating 2D animation you have layer order, when animation is exported to unity layer order converted to animation local z index.

Cheers!

 

HI Great Script!!, is it possible to export layers from AE to Unity to build a scene? Could be nice to composite them inside unity3d as a 2D scene

Best Regards
Daniel

 

So this is animating gameObects, right?

From the video tutorial, it says "complex animation with multiple gameObjects" so with that example, after importing to Unity, the cloud and the flames are all GameObjects? And they are children of the "AfterEffect TestAnimation" GameObject that has the After Effect Component? Did I understand correctly?

So where I'm going with this, is
1) Could I attach a drawmesh that's different from the image in the AfterEffect file but still use the motion? I may want to animate a 3D object, even if the movement is 2D. I understand I would need to be careful to make sure the new mesh is the right dimensions and position, but is it possible?
2) Could I attach a box Collider to one of these animated gameObjects? Would that work?

 

Hi,

when I import the .xml file to the unity "After effect animation", i can't view the content there. any idea?

Thanks!

 

Hi,

Can it's work with all platform like ios or android. Also work with effects like glow.


Best wishes,
play_edu

 

Congrat for this awesome plugin. I animate 2d characters with "Duik" a free Invers Kinematic script for AE, can your plugin export that animation to unity?. Thanks.

this is the Duik plugin http://duduf.net/?page_id=151

 

The problem I thought I had seems to not be there anymore, I'll remove my posts above.
Great Work on this product!

 

Sorry guys for slow replay.
If you have any urgent question better to send me e-mail or private message.

Thanks, but I am not sure what do you mean by this? Can you explain more?

Yes absolutely.

Well yes, that is possible.
But if you will hit Update button animation will be recreated. All game-object's will be destroyed and new animation hierarchy will be created from scratch. But you good until you not going to update animation.

Hello. Seems like you did something wrong . Can you send me example scene or screenshot? And what do you mean by "can't view the content there". If you mean that you can not select game-object with is inside AE animation hierarchy that was made by purpose, but you can disable this behavior by unchecking "Force Selected" checkbox on AfterEffectAnimation component.

Cheers!

 

Opps there is even more replays that I expected. Again sorry for delay.

Hello. Plugins not platforms depended, it can work with any platforms. Not sure what do you mean by glow effects, but it support additive blending and you can specify witch shader will be used for sprites rendering.

Hello, Thanks. Until your animation component only images and composition (from other images and composition) anything can be exapored. If you want to make sure, just send me your animation and I will test this.

Thanks if you will have any problems please just send me e-mail I am responding much faster on e-mails. Forum subscription notification not always working good

 

Приветствую. Спасибо за скрипт. У меня проблема. По какой то причине скрипт открывает программу Maya вместо того, чтобы создать .xml. Подскажи как это исправить? Спасибо.

 

I believe this question was already answered my e-mail. But any way, after xml file is generated it will be opened by system default app. In your case default app for xml file is Maya. It can be fixed like described here

Cheers!

 

Do you export the ease in/out or the curves ( not in a linear way ) ?

And what about the puppet tool?

 

Eatch frame of animation is imported, so you can use any motion curves.

never used it, so not sure how it works. Will check this ASAP.

 

Heh, bad news for the "each frame is exported"
I thought you had figured out how to export tangent informations

It's not a good idea to export each frame in a matter of optimisation



The puppet tool is a sort of FFD > After effect create a mesh which you can deform with controlers. Wonder if you can export that mesh and deformation.

 

Why not?

+ All information is cashed in editor (no file parsing in play mode)
+ In play mode animation only already parsed and serialised data (no additional calculation)
+ Animation is behave exactly like in AE no math infelicity or math algorithm issues

- Export time (not very big issue I think)
- Exported file size (Mac file size I eve get for my games in around 2MB + text files can easily compressed, so in build it will be around 100Kb or so, it steel saves huge amount of app size)

Well I sure it not supported currently, but I will see what I can do.

Thanks for your interest.

 

Very nice tool,

I'm also interested in the Puppet Tool export. Would be great if this is possible.

Question: Is there big technical difficulties in exporting AE camera motions ?
This would also be fantastic if it's possible.

Edit: Noticed that the package is using iTween. Do to performance and platform support concerns would you consider adding support for Hotween (better performance) and LeanTween (better performance and flash support).

Cheers.

 

Hello.

I will start working on it shortly!

That is will be pretty hard to use camera motion. Nxt step is try to implement puppet tool.

Do not warry about it. iTween used only for opacity animation. so ig you not using AnimatieOpcity function - with can be usde for fade in/out whole animation - iTween isn't working.

Animation playing without iTween. It smply has pre-cahsed positions.

 

"Animation playing without iTween. It smply has pre-cahsed positions."

Nice one.

 

@Lacost,

Really enjoying playing with this tool, awesome work.

I know that you are working on the puppet feature, very cool and do not want to disturb.

One thing I would like to mention is that in a future update, would it be possible to use Json instead of XML. The reason is that I would like to load in the anim file during run-time. Xml is too large and verbose.

Cheers.

 

Hi,
I seem to have an issue that no one else seems to have. The anchor points are very off in Unity from where they are in AE. if i rotate or scale the object in AE it moves completely differently in Unity. The Object placement in the AE composition, is different to the object placement Gizmo in Unity. All the numbers translate fine in the XML file compared to AE. I attached an image below that will hopefully make it clear
Thanks in advance

http://imgur.com/QPqucXw.jpg

 

Ive tracked it down to the point that the pivot point is in the correct place compared to the composition. Its the actual object that seems to move without reason when u get it into Unity

 

I want to export a simple custom shape that morphs into other shapes. Will the plugin export animated shapes with their point data? For example a spherical shape with its four bezier curves morphs into a square over time? Will this import into unity ok?
Thanks!

 

Hello there!

Is it possible to import mesh warp animations from After Effects CC to Uinty 3,5 (or Unity 4+ if this make a difference)? I mean warps in 2D graphics.

Greetings!

 

Hey Guys, sorry for slow replay. If you have something urgent you can always drop e-mail at stans.assets@gmail.com

You can only export simple animation created by modifying
* Transform
* Rotation
* Position
* Pivot Position Change
* Parenting
* Additive Texture mixing

 

Hey Lacost,

I am also interested in the puppet tool. Our animators want to use this feature more than any other.

 

I got your feature request!
I hope I will be able to implement it soon.

Cheers!

 

Not working with after effects CC or CC 2014. Is it a bug or my file ? I'm using basic animations with an illustrator document which is maybe the problem ?
Cheers
Emmanuel

 

Hello, yep, currently you should use only PNG files. I am working on PSD exporter tool with make you able to use PSD layer in the animation.

Cheers!

 

hello, i cannot seem to get it to work, i keep getting the error "unable to execute script at line 93. null is not an object". i tried using a totally new project and comp with only two animated layers with masks.

 

Hello. Well this is because mask is not supported. Only listed features in plugin description.

Feature with is coming soon:
Solid Color layer support
PSD layers support

 

Hello !

What a nice tool ! Very efficient !

It seems to work perfectly BUT (of course) when i try it on After Effect 11.0.3.6, Unity can't find the source images on the ressources folder or something like that.

However, when I import xml files generated with lower version of After Effect, it works nice.

Can you tell what's the problem ?

Thanks a lot !

Xavier

 

Hello. I will try After Effect 11.0.3.6 to find out if I can recreate this.
Cheers!

 

Great ! Thanks!

Cheers !

Xavier

 

Hi all,

Is there an expected release date for the update allowing psd layers in after effect animations?

Thanks for your time!
Jeremy