Exploring the complex animation presets

- In a different video, we talked about these simple presets at the top of the preset menu in the animation panel. These are presets that you can, for the most part, pretty much set yourself. In this video, we're gonna talk about the presets at the bottom of the menu, what I call the complex presets. These are presets that come from flash animations, and you can't set them yourself directly. You may not use them very often, but it is important to know what each one does, because if you need a particular effect, this is the only way that you can achieve it.

Let's take a look at this animation that was set up with these complex presets. I'm gonna open the preview panel using the keyboard shortcut "shift", "opt" or "alt", and pressing the return key. In this little scene, we have fish flying through the water, bubbles dropping, worms dancing around, more bubbles dropping, and more worms spinning. All of this animation was done completely using the complex presets. Let's take a look at how the file is set up.

I've moved the "Layers" panel into position here so that we can isolate various objects in this file and see more easily how they were animated. I'm gonna hold down the "opt" or "alt" key and click on the visibility icon for the "fish" layer. That hides all the other layers in the file, and we can focus on our little fishies. This fish has the animation preset, "Swoosh" applied to it. We can see that this creates a motion path, where the fish goes to the right and then flies off the page. And if we look at the "Animation" panel, we can see that the "Opacity" is from a preset.

It's not a simple fade in or fade out. Also, we can see that the "Rotate" and "Scale" settings are empty. That means that there are multiple settings involved here. Again, these were programmed in flash, and we can't get to these directly ourselves. This little fish has the "Animation" preset "Fly In, Pause, and Fly Out". In this case, there is a motion path, but it has special easing settings on it. If we look at the "Speed", or easing, we can see that it's from the preset.

There's also an "Opacity" change that's coming from the preset as well. Let's take a look next at our "bubbles". Again, I'm gonna hold down the option or the alt key, and click on the "bubbles" layer. In this case, this bubble has a preset on it called "Bounce". We have a number of "Bounce" presets here, "large", "medium", "small", and also "Bounce Vertical" and "Smoosh". In this case, we can clearly see the motion path, which is this straight line, but we can also see a separate easing path.

These are the dots that you see here. They're set independently of one another, and that's something we can't access ourselves, directly. Also notice, if we look in the "Animation" panel, there's a "Scale" change. The width and height values here are empty, because there are multiple values here. This bubble is set to bounce vertically. So the motion path is straight, but again, we have an easing path that is set to a custom setting. Let's take a look at our "worms". And here we have a worm with the preset "Dance" applied, so it's dancing about.

This little worm has "Spin" applied. And we actually have one more worm underneath here. Let's hide this fish. This little guy is doing the "Wave". The "Wave" is kind of crazy; we have a motion path that actually goes out and back in, and then an easing path that's all over the place. So it waves off the page, and then it waves back in. Let's turn all the "Layers" back on and take one more look at this animation. It's a great example of our special effects, or complex presets.