Changing individual sizes of object in animation frames

K
Posted By
kevinelwood
Jun 22, 2007
Views
1720
Replies
1
Status
Closed
I am attempting to make an animation in ImageReady. I think I have a good grasp of the concept, but I keep running into a problem that I don’t know how to overcome. I want to change the size or shape of an object in individual frames (for example, making a ball bigger in each progressive frame so that it appears to be coming at you). But every time I change the size or shape in that particular frame, it changes it in all of the frames. I make sure that the one frame is selected, but it still changes them all. Do you know what the problem may be? Thanks.

How to Improve Photoshop Performance

Learn how to optimize Photoshop for maximum speed, troubleshoot common issues, and keep your projects organized so that you can work faster than ever before!

DP
Daryl_Pritchard
Jun 22, 2007
Kevin, when the data content of any visible layer in an animation frame is manipulated, you will see that change reflected through all frames where the layer is visible. However, manipulations of the entire layer, be they the layer position, opacity, style, etc., do appear to be captured as what I’d just call a "current layer state" associated to an animation frame.

So, let’s say you have a ball moving left to right in an animation, but not changing in appearance. With a single image layer of the ball, the first animation frame would have the layer shifted to the extreme left. Generating the next frame, you’d shift the layer a bit to the right, and repeat for however many frames you need, until the ball is at extreme right. All this was done using only a single layer.

But, let’s say rather than move the ball, you have it shrink in 10% increments. For that to occur, you are actually changing the content of the layer itself. content. The first frame would correspond to a visible layer of the ball full size. For the next frame, you’d create a new layer and reduce the ball size by 10%, and hide first layer. For the 3rd frame, a 3rd layer is created again with the ball scaled smaller, and now hiding both the 1st and 2nd layers….and so on.

This is all something I only recently learned myself, so I hope that helps. A few animations I’ve created largely in response to questions I’ve seen here over the years, are found at <http://ambress.com/photoshop/guitar_spin.htm> and I’ve provided a few files for download if you wish to play around with them.

Regards,

Daryl

How to Improve Photoshop Performance

Learn how to optimize Photoshop for maximum speed, troubleshoot common issues, and keep your projects organized so that you can work faster than ever before!

Related Discussion Topics

Nice and short text about related topics in discussion sections