Looking for a more flexible workflow in After Effects? Trigger might be something that will interest you. Trigger takes selected keyframes and creates composition markers from them that will control and trigger the animation’s events.
Free yourself from the timeline and start animating with triggers
All you need to do from there is move the trigger composition marker, to change when that animation event takes place. This will allow you to easily set up and retime animations by moving composition markers around, that dictate when an animation will activate, or how long the animation will play out.
If you use something like Mr. Horse’s Animation Composer, you make already be familiar with this kind of system. Markers will define the start and the end of the animation and moving them around will let you set and retime that clip in a snap.
The problem becomes that every layer now has an expression associated with it. If you have a few layers in your Ae composition, it isn’t too bad, but if you have a crap-load of layers, expressions will slow you down considerably. I assume that Trigger would work with a similar expression-based method.
Still there is a lot to be said for an event-centric workflow, rather than a linear base one. It will allow you to non-destructively create animations and even test out multiple versions really easily. An event based system, will make it much easier to sequence events, simply by moving the markers around the timeline.
Trigger for After Effects Features:
- Call up specific animations inside a composition using layer markers.
- Create multiple animation events with one click and auto generate event triggers onto global comp layers.
- Turn your linear workflow into an automated event based workflow
- Nondestructively retime complex animations
- Easily test out multiple versions of an animation
- Sequence together multiple animation events easily from the comfort of your global composition.
Trigger for After Effects isn’t cheap as far as scripts go. Trigger will cost you $49.99 until the end of the month, when the introductory price turns back to $59.99. Check out the page for Trigger Animation Marker Script for After Effects, for more information.
