Build more natural and fluid animations by learning how to make objects follow complex, organic motion paths in Adobe After Effects. This article explains how to use the Motion Sketch panel to capture nuanced movements and improve the realism of your animations.
Key Insights
- Use the Motion Sketch panel in After Effects to draw custom motion paths with a mouse or stylus, translating real-time drawing into keyframes that reflect speed and direction.
- Adjust capture speed and smoothing settings to refine the motion path—lower speeds and higher smoothing values can produce cleaner, more fluid animations with fewer keyframes.
- Noble Desktop's training demonstrates how to extend animation timing and correct object orientation along a motion path for more realistic movement, such as making a rocket rotate naturally as it curves around planets.
This lesson is a preview from our After Effects Certification Course Online (includes software & exam). Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
For this lesson, we'll be looking at ways of creating more realistic motion than just moving something horizontal, vertical, straight lines, or even basic curves. Looking at ways of making things move in actually very, very curving or organic paths. For this lesson, we'll be working with the Creating Realistic Motion Started file, which I'll open up.
I'll get this message about it being an older file. No problem at all. I'll just save that and that'll fix the problem.
Whenever you open a file created with an older version of After Effects, it will give you this message saying that it's not going to convert the original. It's going to just rename it converted so it doesn't accidentally replace the original file. It does this because After Effects files are not backwards compatible.
A file made in After Effects 2025, for example, cannot be opened up if the user is using 2024. So it doesn't want to accidentally delete a file you may need. So you can call it whatever you want.
I always call this for these training classes, my name and then whatever it is. So it's motion. Okay, so there are two files here using Motion Sketch and creating nulls from paths.
They have the exact same content. It's simply an Illustrator file with some like planets and a little rocket ship here. And I basically want to make this rocket ship follow a kind of curving path around the planets.
Now, making things move is no problem at all. You turn on the stopwatch for position, move things around and you can adjust the motion path to curve it if you need to. But making really kind of like organic curving paths, making things have a lot of turns and twists can actually be very, very annoying.
So we're gonna look at a couple ways of doing that here. First, we'll be using this Motion Sketch. So Motion Sketch is actually a panel.
Window, Motion Sketch right there. The Motion Sketch panel allows you to use your mouse or if you're using a graphics tablet, the stylus, whatever you're using in order to basically draw out motion and it records that as keyframes. So here's what we do.
Capture speed is how fast it's actually capturing based on the movement of your mouse. This is a really personal thing. It's the kind of thing that if you use it a bit, use the effect a bit, use the effect a bit, you'll realize that you need a different speed than say I do.
So I'm going to knock this down to 80 because I found that that's a pretty good speed for me. Smoothing. The program will automatically smooth off the path you're making.
So I'm just going to go with let's say 10 for that. It'll vary. When I am previewing this, I would like to see a wireframe.
It's going to turn the layer I'm dragging into a wireframe. And it also lets you see the background. So let me see the background graphics so I actually know where I'm going to be creating my path.
What it does by default is start and end of the capture is based on the work area bar. So if you basically change this, you'll be capturing only in that range. So right now mine is stretching the entire timeline.
So I'll start my capture. Nothing actually starts until I click inside the comp window. And so I'm going to click and drag like right around here at the bottom of this red planet.
And I'm going to click and drag and I'm going to drag it around a little bit this other planet. I'm going to make it do two loops of this one. And then I'm going to basically bring it around this upper planet and end it in the middle.
And as I let go, the program takes that motion I just did and turns into keyframes. If I press U on my keyboard, I now have position keyframes. So it actually took the exact speed I used and basically made some keyframes closer or further apart depending on how fast I was moving my mouse.
So if I don't like that, I can just undo it. I'm going to delete all my keyframes and go back over there. Maybe I might go with a capture speed of let's say 50 percent.
And I'll go with a greater smoothness with 20. And now when I start capture, I'm doing the same thing around loop to loop. One, two, down between them, up the blue planet, and down in the middle.
And now you can see that I have a few fewer keyframes. But my path is actually a lot smoother than it was before. There's a much higher smoothing effect.
So it's still again based on the speed I was moving at. So if I slowed down, it would actually end up with a longer animation. I'm going to just go out to eight seconds in this.
I've got all the keyframes highlighted because they were just made. I'm going to hold down alt or option and drag that last keyframe out. This is going to stretch the space between them.
I'm holding down shift to snap it. So when I preview this, I've got an animation that does that. Okay.
Now my only problem is that the rocket ship is pointing straight up, which is a little strange, I think. But I want to fix that. So I'll go back to the beginning of the first keyframe right there.
You can see that it's facing this. So the orientation of a layer does not change based on how curvy the path is. But I can adjust this.