50 After Effects Tips and Expressions. A free PDF containing 50 of our most helpful tips, keyboard shortcuts and expressions for Adobe After Effects. A must have for motion graphics designers! Animating in After Effects is incredibly straightforward, but to make things even easier you’ll want to keep these tips and shortcuts handy!
- The LottieFiles plugin converts your After Effects animation into a Lottie format file for use on the web and mobile. The plugin provides a smooth workflow for rapidly iterating on animations and testing feature support across different platforms.
- After Effects counting seconds with the time expression The time expression in After Effects returns a composition's current time in seconds. You can write the time expression in After Effects by simply typing the word time.
- The date and time can be formatted freely. Simply link 'Link to Counter Value' to a slider control and keyframe it to values between 0 and 100. Then you specify which date and time correpsonds to the value 0 and which one to 100. The iExpression figures out the date and time for all other values accordingly.
- The ExpressionTimeline allows you to apply several expressions to a property, so that each expression is ony active for a certain period of time. Instead of an abrupt change between expressions, you can smoothly transition from one expression to the next.
| // Inertial Bounce - Created by Animoplex: www.animoplex.com |
| // Original Version: http://www.graymachine.com/top-5-effects-expressions/ |
| // Modified expression for a smoother bounce effect and easier editing. Use this on any property with two keyframes to get a nice bounce effect that is based on velocity of the value change. Perfect for a scale from 0 to 100 or a speedy rotation that needs some extra life. Adjust amp, freq and decay values to tweak the effect. Amp is intensity, freq is bounces per second, and decay is the speed of decay, slow to fast. |
| // Full Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=653lxeVIyoo |
| amp=5.0;freq=2.0;decay=4.0; |
| n=0; |
| if(numKeys>0){ |
| n=nearestKey(time).index; |
| if(key(n).time>time){n--;} |
| } |
| if(n0){ |
| t=0; |
| }else{ |
| t=time-key(n).time; |
| } |
| if(n>0&&t<1){ |
| v=velocityAtTime(key(n).time-thisComp.frameDuration/10); |
| value+v*(amp/100)*Math.sin(freq*t*2*Math.PI)/Math.exp(decay*t); |
| }else{ |
| value; |
| } |
You probably already looked for it on internet… You probably crushed your head into the table trying to round numbers in your composition on After Effects! Here is the solution: math.round();
Expression Time After Effects Download
We often use the function math.round() to round a dynamic number, for example, a number from a “Slider Control” value. If you link your Source Text to you Slider value (Alt+Click on the clock icon then link it to the Slider value) you’ll see a weird number.
It will return you a value in terms of the Slider position. But what we would like to do is to round this number to make the animation smoother. In order to make this you need to wrap the expression returned by After Effects with the Math.round() function:
And Voilà! Here we are, we just got a beautiful round number… But as we are never satisfated, now we want to round up this number to two decimal places. In this kind of situation, remember, there is always a tip, a way to “cheat”, simply multiply the number by 100 and divide the all thing (the wrap) by 100 as well.
Update – 01/12/2017
Countdown In After Effects
After Effects Expression Time
The last way to round number was the “Tricky” way. Because when you wanna round numbers but you still wanna keep useless zeros after the comma it will cut them out!
Here is the proper way to do if you want to keep the full decimals. You can customise this expression, if you want more or less numbers before and after the comma by modifying the numDec and numDigit vars.