Buried in the shuffle over the announcement of After Effects CS6 is that we concluded the video training series for our book After Effects Apprentice 2nd Edition with a nearly 3.5 hour course dedicated to that book's Final Project. Several movies from this course are available for free preview from lynda.com; we'd like to share those with you here – including this movie on how to reveal Illustrator artwork by copying its paths into After Effects masks.

In this 3+ hour course recorded in After Effects CS5.5 and applicable to all recent versions including CS6, you will pull together skills you've learned in the previous Apprentice lessons, including using masks, effects, shape layers, text, layered Illustrator files, blending modes, track mattes, collapsed transformations, nested compositions, motion blur, expressions, animation presets, audio, a 3D camera and light, and more. Along the way, we share the mental process we go through as we design a video project, including unifying the overall look and handling client changes.

In this specific video, we show how to “wipe on” a dial user interface element by copying the original paths in Illustrator and pasting them into mask paths for the same artwork in After Effects. The Stroke effect can then be used to draw along theses mask paths. We cover issues such as revealing and selecting paths in Illustrator, plus identifying and re-ordering the corresponding mask paths in After Effects:

Later in the same course (available to subscribers of lynda.com, as well as for individual purchase from Class On Demand) we also show how to recreate this element from scratch using Shape Layers in After Effects, and then reveal it using the Trim Paths shape operator. Plus, a new feature in After Effects CS6 is the ability to directly convert Illustrator files into Shape Layers – we discuss this briefly in our review of After Effects CS6 here on PVC, and demonstrate it our separate video course on After Effects CS6's new features (again, available both from lynda.com and soon from Class On Demand).

FTC Disclosure: We make a bit of money whenever you purchase one of our courses from Class on Demand, or have a lynda.com subscription and watch one of our courses. We do not make any money from either when you watch these free videos. We've worked with Adobe over the years, and they give us free access to their software in exchange for testing and consulting, but they did not subsidize the creation of these videos or the book they are derived from.

The content contained in After Effects Apprentice – as well as the CMG Blogs and CMG Keyframes posts on ProVideoCoalition – are copyright Crish Design, except where otherwise attributed.