Wiggle

- I'm in 0802 Wiggle, and we are talking about the wiggle automation. The wiggle tool wiggles things. More precisely, it adds some random motion to the property it's added to without needing to add a single key frame. Duik wiggles well, but also gives you some functions to help control that wiggle. Let's go over a few ways that you can use the wiggle automation in an animation. First, I'm going to select my purple circle, slash all dimensions, and I'll hit P for position, select Position because I want to make sure I'm adding the automation to the specific property I want to affect.

I'll go up to Wiggle and I'll make sure I have the All Dimensions checkbox marked. I'll select Wiggle, and I'll come down and you'll see under Effects here, if I twirl that open, I have this Position Wiggle. Before I preview, I want to make sure I click off of this so I don't accidentally duplicate this because that's a bug that happens. I'll double click on Position Wiggle, and I'll look up at what I have here. If I hit the space bar to preview now, you're not gonna see anything, but that's because Amplitude and Frequency are at zero.

So I'm going to bring up Amplitude to something like 100. Yeah, that's 100 pixels. I'm going to bring my frequency up to something like one, so that's one wiggle per second. And now I can hit the space bar and preview and we'll see we've got a little bit of a slow wiggle going on. Looking pretty good. I'm going to bring that up to something like 330 or 350. Yeah, that looks good. And it's wiggling all over the place, still nice and slow and kind of relaxed.

One thing to notice is we have this Loop Duration. What the loop duration does is it actually makes this wiggle loop so it will come back to its starting point at five seconds. So if I change this to something like one second, you'll notice it goes back to its starting position every one second. It feels a little less random because this loop is going in a one-second loop now. So it can be more or less random based on loop duration. If you take that down to zero, it will never go back to a loop. It will always be random.

All right, let's go down to the pink circle. I'm gonna hit P on that, so I bring up the position. I'll select Position, I'll go back to my Wiggle button, click it, and I'll change it from All Dimensions here to Separate Dimensions. I'll checkmark Wiggle, and now we can see it's a little different on our pink circle's effects panel than on our purple circle. So if I click on the pink circle, I need to open up Amplitudes and Frequencies. With separate dimensions, it lets us control the X and Y axis differently.

I can go ahead and just affect the Y up to something like 120 and make that Y frequency something like 10. Let's make it down to four or five. Six looks good. And we can see it's just kind of bumping up and down, only on that Y axis. I can bring it up more. I can increase the X axis too, but it won't show up until I actually add some dimensions to that X axis. This gives us a little more control over how this wiggle happens.

It's pretty nice. The last thing I want to show is how to use this wiggle on something other than the position of layers. I want to show how you can use it with something like an adjustment layer to add a little bit of fake camera shake to your scene. I'm going to go ahead and hit the space bar to pause playback. I'll close these up, and I'm going to add a new adjustment layer over everything. I'll go to Layer, New, Adjustment Layer. I'm going to move this to the top of my timeline, and I'm going to rename it Shake.

All right, I'm going to go into my effects and presets, and I'm going to find the Transform effect. There we go. I'll go ahead and drop that on here and you'll notice I have all these things that I can transform. Scale, skew, and this will affect everything below it. I'll hit command-Z to bring this back to the original point. I'm going to open up the transform effect in here. I will select Position, I will select Wiggle, I'll make this All Dimensions and select Wiggle again, and now, I'll bring this amplitude up a little bit and I'll bring the frequency up a little bit, let's say 10 pixels and eight, and if I preview, we've got a shaky screen going on.

All right, the frequency at eight is a bit too much, let's make this something like three. That's looking pretty good. So I don't have to just do it on this one position, I can actually go down into here and add some to rotation as well. Wiggle, and I can do the amplitude and frequency of the rotation. I'm going to make the amplitude something like 2%, and I'll make the frequency something like once a second. All right, I think I can bring the frequency up a little bit.

Ooh, not to six. Let's make that two for a second. And I can bring the amplitude up to something like five. Hmm, a little bit too much still. I'll bring it down to two. That looked good. So now, by using an adjustment layer with the Transform effect and adding wiggle to some of those properties, I've made my own fake camera shake and shaky scene to everything. And now we have a whole lot of random motion added to our composition without adding a single key frame.

You've got to love that wiggle!