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There are a ton of applications for wiggle and with these 3 tips you can use it even more effectively.
If you aren't super familiar with the wiggle expression, it's a way for you to have After Effects inject some randomness into your property values, so that without having to create a single keyframe, you can make things more lively. You could apply wiggle to the position and rotation of a layer if you wanted to add some fake camera shake, or wiggle the brightness of a lens flare to make it flicker and look less static and boring, etc. There are a ton of applications for wiggle and with these 3 tips you can use it even more effectively.
Animating - you can actually animate the two main properties of a wiggle to gain more control over it: The frequency & the amount (it's technically called the amplitude) can be animated by adding Slider Controls to your layer (Effect -- Expression Controls -- Slider Control). Then when adding your wiggle, instead of writing a frequency or amount value, you can use the pickwhip next to the expression box to link to one of your slider's values instead! Now by animating the slider value, you're animating the wiggle's properties!
Per Axis - for the times you only want to wiggle a position on a single axis, or wiggle a scale uniformly: You can actually reference the property value itself using value and you can even specify which dimension of a value you're referring to using square brackets. If I wanted only the X value of the position property I would write 0 between square brackets next , for the Y value it would be value[1] and I'm sure you could guess what it would be for the Z Value. Knowing this, we can wiggle on the Y axis alone by having the position property's X Value refer to it's own X Value "value[0]" and making the Y Value refer to a wiggle's Y value "wiggle(1,50)[1]". So The full expression to have wiggle only affect the Y axis would be [ value[0], wiggle(1,50)[1] ]
Smoothing - sometimes wiggles can be a little too twitchy, we can fix that: Using the smooth expression you can smooth out keyframe values, so the first thing to do would be converting your wiggle into keyframes! You can do that by right clicking the property you're wiggling and choosing Keyframe Assistant -- Convert Expression to Keyframes. The two important properties of the smooth expression are width - the range in time to smooth values over, and the samples - how many sample values to use within the range when calculating the smoothing.
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timestamps
0:00 - Intro
1:05 - Wiggle 101
2:52 - Tip 1: Animating Wiggle Properties
4:16 - Tip 2: Wiggling that ax(is)
6:55 - Tip 3: Smoothing Wiggles
tags
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