Measure twice, cut once

Illustrator is a vector graphics editor. With it you can develop 2D images — squares, rectangles, circles — anything from basic primitives to extremely complex shapes. But at the end of the day, it’s 2D.

Fortunately, Illustrator gives us a way to convert some of those 2D shapes to 3D. As shown in the following image, you can see a 2D line drawing that looks like a top-down view of a mallet.

To the right of the line drawing that same 2D image (red handle and gray mallet head) converted to 3D.

Dimensional awareness

The animated gif below shows the 2D Illustrator objects converted to 3D and then imported into a program named Dimension. In this case I’m using Dimension to help me quickly position the objects in the scene that I’m imagining, and then generate object UV maps.

More than one way to skin a cat

The image below shows Photoshop, a slightly different kind of graphic editor. Here I work on developing the UV map; the texture and words that are eventually applied (aka “skinned”) to the head of the mallet.

The time sink

Finally we get to After Effects (image below). I use After Effects to develop the scene, position the objects, cameras, add effects, and most importantly, add motion!

Render & Go!

After finishing the animation part, it’s time to add sound. For simple projects like this one, Premiere Pro works fine. Anything more complex (for example syncing a slideshow to change slides at the beat of the music) and I would recommend adding Audition into the mix. (pun)

Graphics jokes aside, Premiere Pro outputs the final video which can then be uploaded to Youtube, which can then be embedded into your website.