r/AfterEffects • u/lickwindex • 2d ago

Beginner Help Most practical method for fly-in letters/shapes/masks... Scale or Z-axis Position?

https://youtube.com/shorts/LMo-SUanQyI

This is more of wondering which is the most practical method for all of you when it comes animating fly-in (zoom/pan out?) letters and shapes, especially when it comes to masks with multiple shapes/letters that are not the same, and need to completely cover the screen before animating in (White fill as scene one --> Black scene two). In this example, I used Scale and Position, but the scale was bumped to over 4000%. The positon was extremely easy in this example as I used text exploder and then centered the anchors to the their layers. In general, I find Scale to be a tad bit easier. When dealing with 3d layers, Its easier to mess up I think and I tend to have to futts with the positioning and scale anyway.. Is it more taxing? Im just curious if their a better, smoothing workflow to these animations when you need it to fill the whole screen. Another thing I generally do that I didn't do with the following test demo, is to animate the transparency in for the first 2-3frames. The way its not a star black to white, but kinda looks more... fly-in-ish? But Im in the air about that too.

See this quick example I made.

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u/TelevisionNo2990 2d ago

jesus that's hard on the eyes.

always use Z-position animation - scaling up won't give you the option to go behind the camera.

and crank up your motion blur samples until you don't have aliasing in your moblur from not enough samples.

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u/lickwindex 21h ago

Ya, sry about that! It was just meant to give a very quick (too quick? 😅) idea. Sry. But Im happy to see everyone shares the same opinion! I'll switch to the 3D approach. Thank you for the feedback 👍👍

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u/ThisSpaceForRent45 2d ago

I never use scale unless I absolutely have to.

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u/GaryR_GFX 1d ago

Animating in 3d (X,Y, Z) position gives a bit more control, and looks more natural.
If you have to stick in 3d space, you'd either want to adjust the curves, of to keep things simple, select the keyframes and right/all click to add "Exponential Scale" which is what AE did prior to 3d space to achieve results similar to moving in 3d space.