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Or purchase a new Overlord license key. License renewals and new licenses are the same price. Hooray for simple.

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Did you purchase v1 after July 25, 2023? Then yes!

Purchasing an Overlord license gets you the current version and one year of feature updates. Additional features that are released more than one year after purchase are available by renewing your license.

Think of the new features like DLCs. Really cool, but totally optional. You can still play the base game (use Overlord) you purchased forever.

If your work machine is has restrictions on which apps may be installed, it is usually possible to install the Overlord app within a user account, rather than the system-wide Applications folder.

Create a new Applications folder at /Users/<your user name>/Applications and drag the Overlord app here.

(for macOS)

Overlord needs permission to install the Adobe Extension used to communicate with Illustrator and After Effects. If you see an error about Permission denied (os error 13) your permissions need to updated for the extensions install path.

1. ALT click the 🔄 button to open the extensions folder

   ~/Users/<username>

2. Select the /extensions folder and press CMD+I to open the folder info

3. Set the folder's permissions to Read & Write

Try installing the extension again.

1. Search for Virus & Threat protection

2. Locate the threat that was identified when you installed Overlord (probably Bearfoos.A!ml - it's a pretty common false positive detected by machine learning

3. Twirl down the threat

4. Set the action to Allow on device

5. Click Start actions

6. Click Yes to allow Windows Security to make changes

Overlord should now be allowed to run on your computer.

Unfortunately, the Windows security system often blocks apps by smaller developers even if we do everything correctly. We aren't publishing viruses. Promise.

Click the Ai artboard then transfer again

This will set the artboard to active and tell Overlord where to define the comp origin (the 0,0 point) of the shapes.

Why?

If your Illustrator doc has multiple artboards, the relative position of each elements is based on the top left position of the active artboard. Unfortunately, it's not possible to know which artboard is the parent of a shape so clicking to set the Active Artboard in Ai.

Unfortunately, Illustrator does not tell you which artboard is active so it can be a little confusing sometimes.

If you opened the app and can't open it again, it might already be open in your menu bar or system tray. Overlord runs in the background and lives here. Check if the icon is there and click to open it again.

Overlord is limited by what After Effects can draw with shape layers. There are a bunch of elements that Ai uses which Ae does not have an analog for. These types will be skipped during transfer.

• Freeform gradients

• Gradient meshes

• Patterns

• Brush strokes

• Tapered strokes

If your design requires any of these elements, you will want to import these layer with the traditional Ai import method. I often still use Ai layers for background layers and more complex elements that will be animated as a whole layer. The old and new ways work pretty well together.

Tapered strokes: Starting in CC2020, Ae now supports Tapered Strokes. Unfortunately, it is not possible to access this taper data in Ai until Adobe opens the API up for this element.

Illustrator can draw strokes a number of ways, but only basic strokes are supported by Overlord. Brush and Calligraphic strokes may be transferred by expanding them to outlines (Object > Expand), but sometimes strokes look normal but are transferred to Ae at the wrong stroke width.

Check the Appearance panel to make sure the stroke is set to Basic and not a Calligraphic brush by accident. They might look the same, but the data Overlord can see is very different.