Manually Animating Multiple Sized Gears in After Effects

Animating gears.If you run through a few tutorials on the subject, you will find a wide range from scripts, to calculations, while others dive into creating expressions that will autonomously animate the gears.

That is not to say that the only way you can animate gears is with a slide-rule and some graph paper. In fact, you can simply choose to animate them by hand… With keyframes, and it doesn’t take much doing.

As an example, Lee Daniels walks us through the simple technique. It’s really as easy as placing two keyframes for each gear, no matter what the size of the gear is. Of course there will be a little adjustment, but that is easy to do, f you do it systematically. In some cases, good old-fashioned manual effort can still take you pretty far.