Swift and Simple Animation

It's the usual story nowadays: deadlines getting shorter while clients demand increasingly complex projects, and leaving work early enough to spend some quality time with the family/Xbox is getting further and further away from your grasp...

In this climate, you need to utilise every timesaving method you know. Wouldn't it be great if you could somehow animate lots of layers at once, whilst still maintaining flexibility for those dreaded client changes? Well, you've come to the right place!

Not too long ago I had to animate a woman wearing a Mardi Gras costume covered in feathers. To animate all the feathers by hand would have taken too long, and wouldn't have provided the flexibility I needed. The solution I came up with - and which I'm sharing in this tutorial - meant I only had to animate one object. The rest of the animation came from the expressions use and the offset. To illustrate what I'm doing, I've created a simple animation of a peacock displaying its feathers, but you can adapt it to whatever you like, from flocks of birds to crowds doing Mexican waves!

Click here to download the support files (2.54MB)

Click here to download the tutorial for free