AfterEffects Software Workshop 24/1

ADVANCED KEYFRAME TECHNIQUES

back to solid shapes.

select all layers and press U to see all animated properties.

Shapes currently moving across the screen at constant speed. What we're going to look at is acceleration/deceleration, to give the animations a much more natural feel.

First way we're looking it is AE's quick and easy way of doing it.

In the animation menu we can select 'Easy Ease Out' and apply this to the first keyframe (we're going to do this to the green box to start with)

The spacing of the keyframe dots become closer together, making the green box start off slower and speed up, in a more naturally accelerating way.

For the blue box, we are going to use 'Easy Ease In' to cause it to decelerate towards the second keyframe.

Therefore it will start off a bit faster, allowing it time to decelerate.

And finally, with the grey box, we select 'Easy Ease'. which will cause it to accelerate AND decelerate, which is the most natural way of movement.

We can also view the timeline as a graph:

Using this, we can have a greater control over the speed of the action (in this case, change of position). The graph above shows the linear movement of the red solid.

The image below shows the motion graph of the green solid:

We can change the shape of the graph to make certain actions more pronounced:

There's a couple of quite basic methods for affecting the speed of actions.


Couple of test videos taken from the first part of this session

softwareworkshop5vid1 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.





softwareworkshop5vid2 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.




Making use of these skills to create a quick pendulum animation.





softwareworkshop5vid3 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.




Parent Child Relationships:


It is possible to assign layers as 'children' to a particular layer. As this might suggest; the 'child' layer constantly follows the parent BUT can still move freely within various boundaries. 

NESTED COMPOSITIONS:

We can combine (nest) layers using the pre-compose tool:

The layers have been replaced with one layer called 'car'

Changes can now be made in the 'car' composition, and this will automatically change the the 'car' that's nested in another composition...slightly like linking files in InDesign.


And a quick video combining all the skills learnt in this session. Pretty amusing little video:





softwareworkshop5vid5 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.