Aescripts springy-fx v1.2 Free Download

May 16, 2023 4 Min Read

Every animator knows that secondary motion is really the key to add these extra level of life to their character animations.
Indeed, several of the famous principles of animation (“Overlapping”, “Follow through”, “Secondary action” and “Squash & Stretch”), are still learned and used by almost any animator since decades.
But, in fact, these same principles can apply to the motion design field as well, it’s even strongly recommended to use them if you want your animated layers to convey an idea of life ! But creating this kind of secondary motion from scratch within After Effects can be really time consuming and tedious.

Introducing… Springy FX !

The first toolset ever created for After Effects that is entirely dedicated to jiggling secondary motion !

The toolset consists of 9 tools, available as buttons with some neat icons, that can be organized as a row (horizontal layout) or a column (vertical layout, with or without labels).
Among these 9 tools, you’ll find :

1 useful springy Parent constraint ;
7 jiggling deformers (Bend, Shear, Squash & Stretch, Jiggle, Bulge, Twist and Liquid) ;
1 powerful springy Custom effect

In order for you to easily understand each tool, you can always hold down the OPTION(ALT) key while clicking on their button ; it will then open up a helpful descriptive summary that explains what the tool is and how it works !

Using the toolset for the first time is really easy !

Just select a layer that has some keyframed motion on its position ;
Then click on one of the Springy FX’s position based tools (Bend, Shear, Squash & Stretch, Jiggle or Liquid deformers)
See the magic happen ! Your layer (it has to be a solid, a footage or a precomp since Shape and Text layers can’t be deformed properly with this method) has now a nice springy overlapping effect that reacts to your position animation !

You are not bound to always use the position property for the springiness calculation : you can also use a Bulge deformer for an animated scale property, or a Twist deformer as well in case of an animated rotation.

The Parent constraint make your first selected layer follow the second selected one with a nice springy delay.

The Custom effect is the most advanced tool : it will allow you to create this nice springy motion on any numeric single dimension property (multiple dimensions properties like position, special types of values like dropdown lists, color can’t be handled by the tool) as soon as your selected property belongs to an effect (transform, masks, geometry and other group’s properties won’t work neither), based on the keyframed motion on the layer of your choice (you’ll have to choose on which axis you want your custom effect to be based on).
The Custom effect can even be used to create unseen secondary motion on a plugin effect’s property such as Element 3D or Joystick’ n ‘ sliders.
The possibilities are endless !

Even if the Springy FX does all the tedious work for you, you may want to customize the created effects. Of course you can do it, but you’ll have to understand the fundamentals first (it is also strongly advised to see the 4 parts full video overview at the bottom of this page) !

So, here is a detailed explanation of how it works

Each time you apply one of these effects on your selected layer by clicking on the corresponding tool’s button, several things will be created for you :

a new layer with the same name than the first selected layer (because some of the effect’s, like the Parent constraint or the Liquid deformer can handle 2 selected layers instead of one), followed by “Spring Constraint CTRL” ;
a new pseudo-effect called “Springy Deformers CTRL” on the first selected layer, where the dropdown layers list called “Spring constraint layer” refers to the “Spring Constraint CTRL” layer described above (do not change or remove this effect !) ;
a bunch of expressions, that are linked to the “Spring Constraint CTRL” layer’s effects, on your selected layer’s transform properties if you use the Parent constraint, on some newly created effects if you use one of the 7 deformers, or on the selected property for the Custom effect ;

If the selected layer has already some effects created with the Springy FX toolset, you can add other ones on top of them : their controls (sliders) will then be available on the same “Spring constraint CTRL” layer than before. So, it’s important to keep in mind that each layer you want to have some springy effects on them, will have their own unique CTRL layer, with the same prefix.