Ease in and out

So I have a stylistic question. I'm animating a 'steam punk' style pirate animation. There are cogs or pirate style wheels that need to look clunky or jerky when they move. I've been fiddling with ease in and out and the velocity but I can't seem to get the right effect. Can anyone give me some suggestions?

thanks for that tutorial, its great, but I'm not really looking for stop motion. I'm looking for more of a jerky (not jumpy) motion. I assume the best way to do this is with key frames and position movement in after effects?

[kelly armstrong] "I've been fiddling with ease in and out and the velocity but I can't seem to get the right effect."

Just in case you're not already using it -- I find the graph editor [link] to be a lot more intuitive than adjusting incoming and outgoing keyframe velocities in the dialog box.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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An interesting way to add some random stuttering behavior to your animation would be to use the temporalWiggle(); expression. I love this expression for adding a touch of randomness to a keyed animation, it can make things look more natural.

This is different from the wiggle() expression in that temporalWiggle() always returns values from the keyframed animation, it only varies the temporal sampling of those values. Where as wiggle() will alter a motion path, temporalWiggle() only alters the speed of the motion on the path (the spatial path is unchanged).

You can think of temporalWiggle() a bit like scratching on a DJ turntable. The turntable moves forward through the song (the keyed animation) but the DJ can slow, speed up or even reverse the song. temporalWiggle() does this in a random sort of way.

temporalWiggle() must have at least 2 arguments:

temporalWiggle(frequency, amplitude)

The frequency is in Hz and the amplitude is in seconds.

temporalWiggle(1, 1) would change the sampling by up to 1 second either forward or backward from the current frame.

I've included a link to a simple video that shows this behavior, the circle in the video has two linear keyframes and the temporalWiggle() expression applied. In this case I am using temporalWiggle(1, framesToTime(10)) which will sample up to 10 frames away from the current time for the returned value.

http://reels.creativecow.net/film/temporal-wiggle

Darby Edelen