After Ease Makes a One Step Easing Workflow

There are already plenty of easing solutions for After Effects. Clearly it is a problem. We are lucky enough to have Rafi Khan and Angela Yu from Khanyu Inc. talk a bit about easing and their After Effects tool After Ease, and why it is a tool that every motion designer should consider.

We already know how tedious it is to make a bounce and elastic animation in After Effects and you probably already use a tool/script/plugin to do it.  Chances are it’s Ease and Wizz, Motion, Easy or maybe Key Smith.  With so many options out there why did we make After Ease?

most [tools] are functionally incomplete and require multiple UI’s to iterate and tune with.

Existing tools do a great job of exposing power but according to users most are functionally incomplete and require multiple UI’s to iterate and tune with. While manageable, it leaves plenty of room for improvement.  We were looking for a tool that was fast to learn, easy to iterate with, supported both expressions and baked keyframes and worked on all layer types and properties in bulk.  That seems pretty straightforward right? Surprisingly, no existing tool (or combination of tools) does this with minimal UI.

Interestingly, every tool we found was exclusively an expression tool or a baked keyframe tool but nothing did both.  We even tried to find two tools we could use together but nothing quite fit right.  Take a look…

A Comparison of Bounce and Elastic Easing Tools

Expression Based Solutions

Most expression based solutions like Ease and Wizz and snippets you find online make a curve quickly but doesn’t give you a native UI to tune it.  Iteration requires a comfort with javascript, the underlying math and the expression & graph editor.  If you’re like Angela, expressions feel complicated.  Most of the time they’re hard to edit without a strange side effect and you probably don’t have the time to read up on the math and physics to do it properly. Even if you do, switching from “creative” to “code” kills creative flow so you want something that has a UI around the curve.

If you’re tech savvy with After Effects you can set up effect controllers but you can only edit one curve at a time.  Motion is a feature rich tool that automatically creates effect controllers for many of their curves but unfortunately that UI doesn’t work in bulk.  If we had found a tool that supported that and smart baking similarly this it could have been a viable option for us.

Motion UI

Baked Keyframe Based Solutions

Keyframe based tools like Easy are great because they give you “hero points” on a curve and these are easier to fine tune in the graph editor.  If you use the effect a lot, which was often the case for Angela, it created a keyframe management headache.  This could have been acceptable except all aspects of tuning are left to the author via the graph editor with no way to save your own curves for bulk editing.  You have to resort to another tool to help out with that.

Easy Preset UI

Motion Curve in Graph Editor After Applying Easy

The Making of After Ease

With no clear combination of tools to satisfy our needs we set out to make our own.

After Ease UI

First, we wanted to make sure we had a rich tuning experience with our curves so we built an curve previewer that was essentially a mini version of the graph editor.  We felt this would bring some familiarity to the author but rather than showing something like the effect controller UI we wanted to have a customized experience for the curve that took up less screen space.

Next, we wanted our tool to work seamlessly on mask paths and shape layers.  Making this work on bake was straightforward but is next to impossible with expressions because shapes are non-numeric. Doing this with expressions would be super slow and is the main reason why we didn’t support it.

What’s next?

Now that After Ease has been out for a while and we’ve ironed out most of the kinks we want to expand it to have a lot more curves and a rich preset saving experience.  We think this will round it out nicely and make it the complete easing tool motion designers are looking for.

We’re also cooking up a few new tools that are just as good if not better than After Ease.  If you want to be the first to know or get in on our Beta releases, you can sign up for our mailing list.