Butterfly - Adobe After Effects Tutorial

Jacquelin Vanderwood April 15, 2004   1 Basically this lesson covers making the butterfly dance realistically in the air.   2 The first thing we need to do is move the anchor point from the middle of the butterfly to the area of the antennae. Use the Pan tool to move the anchor point.   3 While still in the first keyframe, check the Position. This will help us to now begin to animate the butterfly.   4 Using the Selection tool, move to the 10 keyframe position which is 1/3 the way to frame 1. Go to the next 20 keyframe (2/3 into the first frame) and move the butterfly up. Keep repeating until you get to the last frame. On the last frame we'll bring the butterfly back to the beginning.   5 So our animation should be up and down as shown below.   6 At the last keyframe bring the butterfly back to the beginning. Use the arrow tools to place it in the exact position as the beginning keyframe.   7 At this point we want to tell the butterfly to move correctly following the path. To do so we use Auto-Orient (Alt+Ctrl+O). Apply that now.   8 Specify Orient Along Path. Now press the Spacebar to watch the animation.   9 To give the butterfly a less jagged appearance, switch to an antialias mode for this layer.   10 Click on the word Position to select all of the keyframes. Select Easy Ease to promote a more normal animation flow.   11 At this point we want to increase and decrease the size of the butterfly at intervals. With the butterfly layer selected, press S. Click on the clock to set a keyframe. Go about halfway in the animation and enlarge the butterfly. Go to the last keyframe position. Now copy the first keyframe Scale size and paste into the last position. Now go midway between the first Scaled keyframe and the midpoint keyframe and reduce the size of the butterfly. Do this also on the mid point between the middle and last keyframe so you'll have the butterfly start out normal, get smaller, get larger, get smaller again, and resume back to normal. Play the animation. If you find that the butterfly goes outside of the screen, use the Selection tool to pull it into the screen at that particular point. For interest, I changed the Transfer Mode of the butterfly to Pin Light.   12 At this point I'll render the animation as an animated gif at a reduced size for showing on the web.   Copyright 1998-2004, Jacquelin Vanderwood, All Rights Reserved