In traditional pen-and-paper animation dating back to the s, special lighting rigs and purpose-built devices like multiplane cameras were used to pull off special effects that changed animation forever! Because most things can be boiled down to numeric values for example, opacity as a percentage or the position of a Transform Mask , and because computers are great with maths and automation, we can plot and visualize the change in values over time on a simple 2D graph.
Settings — While all of the high-traffic controls are presented directly, the right end of the toolbar also contains buttons for opening submenus for things like onion skins and settings that you can generally set and forget for example, playback range , frame rate and autokey mode. Channels List — This area shows the various channels of the current layer that are currently being animated within the Animation Curves Docker. Each independent channel is associated with a unique color and its visibility within the graph view can be toggled by clicking on the eyeball icon.
Graph View — Last but not least is the graph view , the big graph of values and times that we use to animate the value of parameters over time. When a keyframe is added to the current channel at the current time it will appear as a colored circle within the graph view. After clicking on the keyframe to select it, you can change the value by dragging the circle vertically or by entering a specific value into the value box on the toolbar. Similarly, you can change the time of the selected frame by dragging it horizontally.
Finally, when the select keyframe is using bezier curve interpolation , selecting it will cause one or more curve handles to appear, which can be used to change the shape of the interpolation curve over time. Say you want to animate something like an expanding cloud of dust that gradually becomes more transparent as it dissipates, or maybe a haunting ghost that seems to materialize out of thin air.
After selecting the layer that you want to animate the opacity of, you need to select the frame time you want the opacity to start changing at by clicking somewhere on the frame timing header at the top of the graph view.
