Animating Illustrator Blends for fun and profit

Here's some rainy day fun, let's animate Illustrator blends to make interesting animated gif's.

There are quite a few steps involved, but once you got them down you'll be making these with ease.

In Illustrator create a blend using two different objects. In my example I used a star shape and a circle. To create the blend between the two objects double click on the blend tool in the tool bar and in the options dialog box choose Specified Steps, enter a value of 10 and click OK. Select both objects and click on the first object and then the second object with the blend tool to blend them.

You can have multiple object in a blend so draw another object and then use the blend tool to add that to the blend by clicking on the end of the first blend and then the new object.

Ok we have a blend, but it's pretty dull just sitting there. Let's prepare it for animation.
A. With the blended objects selected choose OBJECT>EXPAND

B. Then choose OBJECT>UNGROUP. This will break the blend into individual objects.

C. Open the layer pallet (WINDOW>LAYERS) Click on the option menu button on the side of the layers pallet and choose RELEASE TO LAYERS (SEQUENCE). This will break it into individual layers.

D. Now we export it as a Photoshop .PSD file by choosing FILE>EXPORT>PHOTOSHOP (PSD)

E. In the Photoshop export dialog box we want the settings to be COLOR MODEL RGB, RESOLUTION SCREEN (72dpi), EXPORT AS PHOTOSHOP CS, WRITE LAYERS with MAXIMUM EDITABILITY and ANTI-ALIASED. This will give use a layered Photoshop file that we can bring into ImageReady and animate.

So fire up ImageReady and open the Photoshop file you just created. You can then open the Animation Pallet (WINDOW>ANIMATION) and then click on the animation pallet options menu button and choose MAKE FRAMES FROM LAYERS.

There you have it, an animated blend! Yippie! You can then choose FILE>SAVE OPTIMIZED to create an animate GIF file that you can place in your web page or what have you.

You could also create a Flash movie of the animation by choosing FILE>EXPORT>MACROMEDIA FLASH SWF in ImageReady.

Enjoy!