Animation Question

[Steve Roberts]

Please read the manual on animation and keyframing before posting here. Thank you.

[Darby Edelen]

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.

[Mike Clasby]

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.

[French_will]

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

[French_will]

Thnaks for the tutorial also. I have just viewed it and it’s a great introduction.

Cheers.

Will