Feature Request: Granular AE import... possibly using paths?

[mjl398]

My team and I are planning a web series, and I would like to be able to use Character Animator to seed animations in AE. Are there plans to implement any kind of granular export feature to AE? It would be good to be able to import each character animation as a composition with keyframes that move each and every element visible to the animator who will be polishing, combining, and compositing. Would be nice for these to be infinitely scalable if possible.

I've seen a similar thread to the question above, so apologies for redundancies. But I've got another one for you:

It would further be cool to have a mode that, for illustrator puppets, imports discreet elements as animated paths so they could be fed into other plugins that accept mask layers as inputs. Like the eyes come in as their own set of paths, the mouth as another, the hair as another, the nose... each on their own layer comprised of masks only. This could open up an absurd world of possibilities.

[oksamurai]

Great ideas, and yes, you're not alone - I'd love those too. I'd encourage you to add or vote on them here: Ideas for Character Animator

For the first, it's a little difficult because if everything is keyframed it could get pretty busy and unwieldy...but we have some ideas here. I think better connections between CH & other Adobe products is something we will continue to improve on with each release, because those are the most common workflows.

Masking is also something we've wanted to do for a while. You can currently make a Franken-puppet today by importing different parts and combining them in CH, but yes, masking would make that very powerful indeed.