February 2009 Archives

I’m pleased to announce version 2.0 of Ease and Wizz, the After Effects palette for smoother easing. It’s an adaptation of Robert Penner’s easing equations for Flash, and gives you more options when you’re tweening values such as position, rotation, or scale.

The big change in this version is that now you can tween along a curved motion path, which was previously impossible (the expression would effectively ignore the bezier curves, and the resulting motion path would be linear). Also, you can now apply easing expressions to mask paths and shape paths.

I call this monumental addition … “Curvaceous”.

Note that when using Curvaceous, you will no longer have access to Back and Elastic tweening. The (slightly techie) explanation for this that rather than tweening the actual value of the property, Curvaceous tweens the time of the property, using the valueAtTime method. As the Back and Elastic easing types actually overshoot the original keyframes, Curvaceous has no way of knowing how to extrapolate the extra data to move past the last value. Simply turn off Curvaceous if you require Back or Elastic (the palette updates when you toggle Curvaceous, so you don’t need to commit this to memory).

http://ianhaigh.com/easeandwizz/

Hope you find it useful!

I plan on making the top level landing page a little friendlier, so visitors aren’t scared off by the technobabble. So! You’ll continue to find more geeky Mac, After Effects, and scripting miscellanea at http://ianhaigh.com/blog/. The new Atom feed URL will be http://ianhaigh.com/blog/atom.xml.

Assuming I don’t break everything and have to start again, that is.

Timesaving! Set up a filter using labels or similar, and see a whole bunch of new messages at once. New in Gmail Labs.