Hey there, and welcome to the second Getting Started tutorial for Earth Studio.
My name is Jon, and in this tutorial I'm going to be taking you through
how to ease in Earth Studio -
and easing is something that allows us to affect how our animation moves
between two keyframes.
To get started, I'm going to just make a quick example project -
I'll call this one "Easing" -
and I'm going to go to the Shinjuku region of Tokyo
because it has really nice 3D data and it serves as a nice canvas for this demo.
So to start, I'm gonna make sure that our buildings here are off to the right
and you can see this park over here to the left
and I'm gonna limit this animation to just one attribute,
so that we can very clearly see how easing is affecting the motion.
And in this case it's gonna be Pan.
I'm going to do a quick pan over this downtown area of Tokyo.
So I'll get started by setting a keyframe at frame 0.
Then I'll drag my playhead to frame 90,
and I can scrub this value so that I pass the city
and I'll click the "N" key to set the end of the work area here,
and I'll hit "Spacebar" to play back.
And so, just like that, we've got a simple pan over this skyscraper area
in Tokyo, but it's very flat, it's very constant-motion, it doesn't look very nice
and this is because this kind of straight keyframe-to-keyframe motion
doesn't actually happen in real life.
Absolutely everything is going to start from a stop,
and it's going to slow down to a stop.
And this idea of easing to and from motion is where this term "easing" comes from,
and we can do that in Earth Studio.
So to start, we're going to select these keyframes
and we're going to right-click on them -
and we're going to get a menu here that has some easing options,
so you'll notice that our linear is our default easing option right here,
but we also have an ease-in and an ease-out.
Ease-in is going to slow down your motion as you enter a keyframe,
and ease-out is going to speed up as your playhead leaves the keyframe.
And auto-ease is simply a command that will apply either an ease-in or an ease-out
to the keyframe, depending on if it's the first in the sequence,
the last in the sequence,
or - if it's in the middle - will apply both an ease-in and an ease-out.
There's also the step function, which will hold the value of the first keyframe
until you get to the second keyframe
and that's useful in certain situations.
For now, we're just going to do an auto-ease,
and you'll notice that we have some indicators here
that appeared right next to the keyframe, these little triangles,
and those let us know that this keyframe now is having easing applied to it,
there's something different there.
So we'll go back to our first frame and we'll press "Space" to play back
and we'll see that now our motion is speeding up from a stop at the beginning
and slowing down to a stop at the end.
It's a subtle adjustment, but it does make this look a little bit more lifelike
and a little bit more fluid.
But now let's see if we can make this a little bit more dramatic,
if we can really exaggerate this ease effect.
And we'll do that by entering the Curve Editor, which we can do by clicking
on the attribute that we want to adjust.
And you'll see that our timeline is now replaced by this totally new view.
And this is simply a graph that represents our pan attribute
as a function of value, on the y axis, over time, on the x axis.
Our yellow curve here corresponds to the yellow indicator
next to the pan attribute, and we have a few different control points here
to play with.
We have these big circles, and those are just our keyframes,
and we can actually move these up and down
to directly adjust the value of our keyframe at this position.
And we can even move the keyframe left and right
to adjust the timing of our animation in the Curve Editor.
But we're not going to do that for now.
We're going to undo, and we're going to actually focus on the smaller circles -
and these are easing handles.
And so, if you're familiar with programs like Illustrator,
or another vector-drawing program,
you've probably seen this type of graph before,
and this is just a simple Bézier curve.
So as we adjust this handle, we'll notice that the shape of our curve
changes depending on the position of the handle in relation to the keyframe.
So if we just drag this out really far, we'll see that our curve changes
and we can actually hold "Shift" to constrain to the horizontal axis.
And this is nice if we want to be sure that our motion is speeding up from a stop
rather than starting at some level of speed,
which can sometimes feel a little bit jarring
when it just kind of jumps into a motion.
But we'll make sure that this is straight for now, and we'll do the same thing here
on our last keyframe.
And when we hit the "Spacebar" we'll already see a big change here at the top:
it feels much more fluid, much more lifelike,
and this just shows you how impactful easing can be on the feel of a move.
And we don't have to actually restrict these to horizontal like we just did.
If we were to move this easing handle straight up,
we'll get a totally different effect.
In this case it's kind of a whip-pan effect as it starts off very fast
and gradually slows to a stop at the end.
And this curve is a really nice way to visually see how that motion feels.
So you can see that this is extremely powerful.
We can do a lot of different things here, but for now,
we want to go to one more special feature of the Curve Editor
and that's dealing with multiple attributes at the same time.
So, I'm gonna select this keyframe - both of these keyframes -
and I'm going to "Command-click" on one of them,
and "Command-clicking" simply toggles between linear and auto-ease,
and I'm going to exit the Curve Editor and go back to the Keyframe Editor
by clicking off of this attribute and some of this dead space up here.
And now what we're going to do is we're going to add some position changes
to this animation.
I'm thinking I'll start maybe a little bit further up here, at the beginning,
and I will keyframe just the position attribute right there,
and then I'll go to my last frame and I'll move this down a little bit
and kind of line it up to where it was in the original move
and I'll keyframe there.
So now we can see, similar thing to before, we have this motion -
but it's very flat and a little bit boring,
and we're gonna liven this up a little bit by easing.
So we can click on any of these attributes to enter the Curve Editor,
or we can shift and click to select a bunch of attributes at once.
And we'll see that they're all represented here in the Curve Editor
as different-colored lines,
and the colors of those lines - just like before -
correspond to the color next to the attribute name.
So what we want to is do is, we want to select all of these keyframes
and we want to apply an auto-ease to them.
And when we hit "Spacebar" now, we'll see it already looks a lot better.
The speed-up and slow-down effect is really nice,
and we want to make this even more pronounced.
So we can select all of these at once and hold "Shift" to make sure
that these handles stay constrained to the x-axis,
and we'll drag these out a little bit.
And I'm going to do the same thing over here on these first keyframes
and now, when I go back and I play,
you'll see that we have this really nice, dynamic move.
Everything feels smooth and kind of like one cohesive animation.
And for now I think this is all we'll do when we're talking about easing.
Just a few more loose ends to tie up
with how we can navigate this Curve Editor a little bit more:
if I were to click off of these and go to Pan,
we'll see that we have our pan value curve here,
and we can do some of these controls here to adjust our view
of the curve in the timeline.
So if I scrub this to the left and right, I can adjust the horizontal zoom
of the Curve Editor there.
I can also use this yellow button here to fit the entire graph to my view,
both vertically and horizontally.
And with regards to vertical zoom,
by default we have this function on that auto-zooms your curve to view vertically.
And this is super useful.
For example, if we were to zoom in horizontally a lot,
and scrub left and right, we'll see that this curve always stays in our view.
But if we hold the "Spacebar" down, and drag up and down, we'll see that
we can actually turn off the auto-fit
and explore the Curve Editor a little bit more.
In this case, it doesn't have much use but you might find a need for that later on.
And you can always click this again
to snap that curve back into your view vertically.
And for now that's, I think, all we're going to cover with easing.
Just like before, be sure to check out our documentation for more information
about easing, in particular, and also the rest of Earth Studio's features.
So until next time, thanks a lot!