Pixelmator Pro: a £35 Motion SVG plug-in
You can now import hand-drawn vectors from an iPad into Motion using this app. It makes me very happy: well done those guys.
I saw this post about a recent Pixelmator Pro update. You can now export vector assets as bona-fide Motion projects out of Pixelmator Pro (HT Ben and Luis, also Ripple Mark for this lovely demo video). I haven’t used Pixelmator in years (the Affinity guys have the edge in terms of iPad drawing and cross-platform transferability) so I didn’t get Pixelmator Pro when it came out because… it’s yet another thing in a folder of things. But this recent update got my attention. Essentially it links up the considerable strengths of hand-drawn iPad vector-tools with the animation-flexibility of Motion. It’s always a sadness when I have to make things in Motion because the tools are never that good - I have been drawing for years and the trackpad not the same for certain things. Earlier this week I resigned myself to constructing a map line using a trackpad because that’s how it’s done in Motion… click click click scroll click click etc. Now (with what is technically a £35 plug-in) I can draw confidently in the old way and send things across via SVG.
Here’s the process
draw something/anything on the iPad in Affinity Designer - making full use of the strengths of that life-changing Apple pencil
bring it back into the Mac and export as an SVG
move that file across into Pixelmator Pro
export as a Motion project
The (silent) clip below is not at all refined (hey this is process blog - what were you expecting, Instagram?). It is a further experiment where I am trying to link various behaviours to save animating everything using keyframes. The lines have all been drawn using the above method. I had actually already drawn them with the trackpad but went back to see if it was quicker/easier. It really was.
Linking behaviours brings greater flexibility
Some brief notes:
the drawn vector lines use the write-on behaviour to draw out (this may be problematic when I want them to slow and pause at different points - have yet to work this one out but I’m sure it’s possible)
it seems simpler somehow to have the route in two colours/parts for clarity
the ‘you are here’ circles use Motion Path behaviours that link to the geometry of said drawn vector routes
in the end I was having a lot of trouble getting the camera framing behaviour to obey my choices so I hand-keyframed the movements (in some ways this feels better anyhow because I like the imprecise feel of it)
forgive me, but the course incline box in the bottom corner is a visual mess (and probably too busy I think) but I wanted to give it a go - the steepness of the route seems like an important piece of info to impart so I thought I’d try and find a way of automating it. I connected the yellow and red route-halves to the main route animation with the link behaviour applied (using reverse behaviour for the second part to get it flowing in the correct direction). Unfortunately I had to resort to hand-key framing the sideways scrolling because I was too tired to work out how to animate the anchor point. It will hopefully come to me soon.
This represents some solid steps forward. Building behaviours into the guts of an animated timeline allow for some flexibility if you need to change things later, but they take a bit of getting your brain around.