Klipp og Lim

Now and again I’m asked if I could share a few After Effects tips and tricks, so here goes.

As most animators know, good easing can really make an animation go from decent to great. If an object is supposed to appear somewhat realistic; it has to emulate physics to a certain extent. Pretty basic animation knowledge, and a linear easing curve will rarely achieve that effect. After Effect’s in-built graph editor has gotten slightly better with time but I still find it difficult to make it act like I want it to, and it always seems to take a lot of time getting it right, especially if you’re trying to produce some quick drafts.

One of the plugins I couldn’t have managed without would have to be the simple yet quite genius Ease and Wizz-plugin by Ian Haigh. Best part is, it’s free! Version 2.0 was also just released with support for animation curves as you can see in the screencast. This little tool basically let’s you get access to every easing type in a mouseclick — just select the keyframes, select easing type and press apply and that’s all there is to it. Easing types like bounce, elastic and back are also included, which is great since these would usually take some more time to reproduce by using the graph editor.

The possibilities are endless. Just imagine using different easing types on the X/Y/Z-properties of a 3D-enabled object, camera positions and/or point of interest — different settings will yield completely different results. It won’t do much for opacity-related parameters, but for just about every other property it works magic. The plugin is very easy to install, it’ll make the workflow smoother and usually give a more professional looking result. For anyone new to After Effects or who haven’t heard about this one before;  download, install it and give it a try. The Expo (exponential) easing-type will pretty much work anywhere :)

Tip by Gustav — I’ll try to keep posting more similar tips and tricks in the time to come.