Quizzler solution three: Overshoot animations - After Effects Tutorial

The last Quizzler puzzle we're going to unravel is how do you create this overshooting animation with the minimal number of keyframes, and it's really quite a useful trick. Now the obvious way to solve this problem is to use three keyframes: have a starting keyframe here for both Scale and Rotation, come out to the end of my overshoot, put another keyframe there for this Rotation and this Scale, and then add a third keyframe here at my rest position. However, you can do this in two keyframes instead of three. I'll open up Comp Quiz - Overshoot Comp. I saved this with the Graph Editor open and you see what I've created are two keyframe paths where the handle actually is pulled upward to create an overshooting animation. A typical Ease In animation comes in flat and horizontal along this line. I'll press the Shift key to constrain that. Now I'll do the same for Rotation here. This is your classic ease in to your final position animation and I'll RAM Preview. But if you want to overshoot that final position, you can pull the handle above the horizontal line. This will cause the graph to now actually go above the at-rest position then come back down into at-rest. I'll do the same with Rotation here, preview, and now you'll see our overshoot and snap back animation. You can do a lot of fun things with the shapes of these curves inside of the Graph Editor. I could go to the other extreme. If I pull this handles below the line, maybe even something like this, instead of easing into my final pose, instead I will rush up to my final poss. I'll preview and you see how it slams into that position. So it's another fun animation which is easy to create in the Graph Editor, but what you can't really do if you're not in here. You need control of these handles to create unusual animations such as this. Let's do one more trick. Now honestly, this little overshoot and slam, it's not my favorite look. It's kind of unsettling to see this snap back and sudden stop in position. It's visually interesting, but maybe not what a real plant would do, as if this was a real plant. So let's try variation on this move. Rather than editing the last keyframe in an unusual way, let's go and make a simple Ease In here on these, instead let's edit the first keyframe in an unusual way. Now the default is a linear keyframe, which means no handles. That's no problem. I'll hold down the Option key on Mac, Alt key on Windows, get my Convert Vertex tool and drag myself out of handle. I'm going to do the same thing for my Rotation value. Now that I have handles, I can play around with what they do. If I want to create an overshoot animation, I need to pull this handle upward and pull it to some considerable length to create my overshoot. See that's a very similar curve as I had before, but now I've got my incoming handle to my last keyframe to smooth out this final approach. So you can see what's going on here. I'm going to go ahead and hit plus a few times and move a little bit later in time, so you can see what's happening with this final keyframe. There we go. Overshooting, there is a handle for it, then coming back into position. I'm going to zoom back out again and do the same thing with Rotation. Get its handle, drag it really long so I overshoot my final value then use my second keyframe's handle, Shift key to make it horizontal, and ease into that final value. Now let's look at this animation. Now the flower still overshoots its mark, but rather than slamming back in its final position, it more softly settles in to the position. Now I can change how softly it settles by playing around the links of these handles. Now I know the Graph Editor is daunting and it's not necessarily intuitive for an artistic type, but I hope you can see now how useful it is to master it, because you can create these subtle or complex animations with relative ease, where you'd just otherwise be creating loads of keyframes and really tweaking values and spending a lot of time trying to get the look you want, when it might be as simple as dragging couple handles in the Graph Editor.