How do I apply an effect slowly?

[sb_stefan]

Ok, I'm new here and new to AE, so please bear with me. Here goes:

I have an image of a world map. It's a flat rectangular vector image (.ai). I applied the effect called CC Sphere to make it look like the earth. But my problem is I don't want it be a sphere from the start of my comp, but to slowly wrap into this shape, if that makes any sense. When I start playing my clip I want it to be a flat image, and the a few seconds in I want it to slowly wrap into a ball (i.e. the earth).

Can someone please point me in the right direction to achieve this?

Thanks in advance!

[Michael_Szalapski]

You can't do that with CC Sphere only.

You could fake It becoming spherical in a number of ways, but the easiest would probably be to use a real 3d app (like Cinema 4D which comes free with AE CC).

[star+circle]

Here's a relative fiddly workaround for doing this with CC sphere.

Essentially you make a precomp that is much larger than the final comp and scale the texture up while scaling the sphere down.

The fiddly part comes from making the cc sphere down scaling match the texture upscaling smoothly: you have to use the graph editor to make it work.

If you need it to be totally flat in the beginning, you'll need a mesh warp to fix the spherical distortion, for it is still a piece of a spherical surface.