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Animation Question
Hi all!
I am a new user to After Effects and I am trying to create a simple animation. Basically, I have four differnet coloured “fish” images. I want to animate them in 24 to move accross the screen and out the other side at varying speeds. Perhaps random entry pointson the left.
I am really struggling to find a way of doing this. The animation is not to be complicated. The fish are merely to move accross the screen they don’t need to be animated themselves. So, a bit like a marquee effect but with images.
Could anyone point me in the right direction. I am really not sure the best way to start this.
Thanks in advance.
Will
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5 Replies
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Please read the manual on animation and keyframing before posting here. Thank you.
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I would just set position keyframes at the time where you want the fish to begin their trip, move ahead to where you want them to finish their trip and create another position keyframe.
If you want a more realistic ‘fish’ like movement I’d recommend using the wiggle(); expression on the position:
Select the position property of the fish you want to wiggle, then hit alt-shift-= (or opt-shift-= on Mac) to add an expression.
The default expression should be:
transform.position
Change this to:
transform.position.wiggle(.5, 4);
This will cause the fish’s position to vary by up to 4 pixels every 2 seconds. You can change the number values in the parenthesis to suit your taste, the first is the frequency (number of wiggles in a second) and the second is the magnitude (amount to wiggle).
One thing to note, this will wiggle the fish with the same frequency and magnitude in both the X and Y dimensions. You could try this expression if you want it to wiggle more (or faster) in one dimension than another:
tempX = transform.position.wiggle(.5, 4)[0];
tempY = transform.position.wiggle(.3, 10)[1];
[tempX, tempY]This would wiggle the X value more frequently but with less magnitude than the Y value.
Sorry if this is complicated, feel free to ask for any clarification you need.
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A good place to start is Andrew’s tut, AE 101:
https://www.creativecow.net/articles/kramer_andrew/aftereffects101/ae_101.html
At the 5 second mark Andrew sets keyframes for position animation.
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Many thanks!
That has set me off in the right direction. I coould not quite get the wiggle to work but I will keep trying.
Thanks again for your help.
Will
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Thnaks for the tutorial also. I have just viewed it and it’s a great introduction.
Cheers.
Will
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