The Smoother - Adobe After Effects Tutorial

Jacquelin Vanderwood 1 In this lesson I'll be using a bee animation which I first created the artwork in Illustrator and opened in AE. I then animated the bee. (You can find out how to animate in another tutorial named "Animating a Plane".) The Smoother is used to smooth paths, curves, excess keyframes or too few keyframes. The Smoother works best with animation generated by Motion Math and/or Motion Sketch. The Smoother will "even out" a curve created with Position; it will even out the value and velocity of Opacity. In tune with that, the Smoother will also add Bezier interpolation when smoothing the curve. You can go in adjust each Bezier curve individually as well. 2 Begin by selecting Position. You do this by clicking on the layer word. This selects all the keyframes. 3 Open Window>The Smoother. 4 Here is The Smoother dialogue box. When you apply The Smoother, it will automatically apply Spatial Path or Temporal Graph depending on the type of property you're applying it to. You can adjust the Tolerance. Higher Tolerance values will give you smoother curves. If set to high, the shape will become distorted. Press Apply. 5 Immediately you'll note in the Timeline that quite a few keyframes have been added. 6 Here is the result up close. The Before and After. 7 Here is the finished product below.   Copyright 2002, Jacquelin Vanderwood, All Rights Reserved