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Simplist way to make animations more choppy/jerky and less smooth.
Hello, I’m creating some graphics that need to look like they are from a video game HUD and general interface, and I want to simulate a lot of video game looks and behaviors. A lot of times this means animations NOT being smooth, for instance in most video games when you change a setting in the menus that is on a slider it usually bumps up one by one in a jerky manner, with non linear behavior, as a human is manually pressing up repeatedly on a controller.
One particular instance, I have an on-screen “brightness slider” like you often see when playing a game for the first time. This is a bar with an indicator in the middle and as I slide it left and right I will decrease then increase the exposure of the image beneath. The problem is, when I animate the indicator from the center to the left with keyframes, it moves very smoothly, which doesn’t look very video gamey.
So I’m wondering if anyone has any quick methods to make animations sort of stutter, so it actually hangs on a few of the median positions for a frame or two before moving on to the next. I have tried precomping my animation and making the precomp 10fps, and this helps a little but not much. My current method is to animate normally to get the timing right, then when timing is finalized make many keyframes between the first in the last, sometimes duplicating a keyframe, to make the animation more jumpy. As you can imagine this is quite time consuming and I imagine there has to be a faster way
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4 Replies
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The effect “Posterize Time” lets you decrease the frame rate of a layer. You could keyframe the Frame Rate property if you want it to be inconsistent.
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You could try animate your slider. Then “alt+click” on the position stopwatch to create an expression, press enter on the num keypad to close the expression editor. Right click on one of your keyframes, go to Keyframes Assistant and choose “Convert Expressions to Keyframes”. Every frame will get a keyframe, while all of those are still selected press “Cntl+Alt+H” to turn them into hold keyframes. This will add some jerkiness, then just delete some keyframes in places to make it jump a bit. If you want the slider to move a bit smoother, select areas of the keyframes where you want it to be smoother and “cntl+click” the keyframes to turn them back to Linear Keyframes.
Johnny Cuevas, Editor
ThinkCK“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb. -
Chaz, this works great, thank you so much
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John, this is great stuff, thanks!
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