Subtitles of the Movie

I have one more example of the Link Behavior in action that I want to demonstrate, and this has more to do with Event-based animation. Let's play the animation. So I have a 3D scene with a bouncing ball that creates effects every time it hits the floor. I'm not going to talk about the 3D aspects of this scene. The Link Behavior works just as well in 3D as it does 2D, the animation just looks cooler in 3D, but what I want to focus on in this lesson is how the effects know when to turn on. The Link Behavior is applied to several objects and we'll take a look at each. I'll solo one at a time. First, I have a light that travels with the ball. It's a Point Light that's aimed at the floor. Next, we have a Flare Generator and as I scrub we see the Flare turn on and off. Then there's this Target Graphic. This also turns on and off. This Target Graphic is a new Generator to Motion 4 called Concentric Shapes. As you can see in the Inspector it makes black and white rings, which I'm using as an Image Mask for this Gradient Layer. They're all part of this group I've labeled Rings Group. Finally, here's the ball by itself. It's the only object in its group and it has several Behaviors. The ball has Throw, Gravity and Edge Collision Behaviors, which make it move and fall and appear to bounce off the floor. The ball is not really a 3D object. You can't have real 3D objects in Motion unless you have a third party plug-in like Zaxwerks Pro Animator. This ball is a 2D graphic, which looks 3D because it has Point At Behavior. Let's take a look at that. The Point At Behavior has an Image Well, as we've seen before. This time the object that it's looking at is our camera object here. You can see it in the Layers tab, so no matter where the camera looks the ball will orient itself to face it, which makes the ball seem to be 3D even though it's only a simple 2D graphic. Toward the end and I'll scrub the Playhead a bit, the ball gets brighter with a glow, which brings us to the ball's last behavior as we see in the Layers tab, this Link Behavior here. I've changed the name of it to say Y-POS LINK because the behavior settings are driven by the ball's position vertically, the Y position or Y-POS. You probably already noticed that the Source Object for this Link Behavior is itself. Let me repeat that: the ball has a Link Behavior with itself as the Source Object, so it's possible to have one parameter drive the effect of another parameter on the same object. In this case, the ball's Y-Position is driving the Opacity of the Glow Filter I have applied to the ball and I'll scrub again. So, every time the ball gets near the floor the Opacity goes up so we can see the glow. Pretty cool. But here's the even cooler part. This behavior knows when to turn on the effect with this setting - the Apply Link When setting. Click on that and we can choose Any source value, which keeps the effect on all the time, or within or without the min and-or max values you set. So, I have the Link Behavior apply the values when the ball gets near the floor, which is why I have very small numbers in the Y min and Y max values. So, why do I have it set to apply the link values when the source value is outside the min and max settings? We've run into something like this before. Remember the last lesson with the negative Z-Rotation? Well, something similar's happening here. In the Properties tab watch the Y-Position field as I scrub forward. As the ball falls the values of the ball's Y Position decrease, so if the Glow is linked to falling values the glow would diminish, not increase, right? And that's the opposite of what we want. Let's get back to the Behavior. So, what I'm really doing with this link is just the opposite of what you might think at first. I'm not really animating the Glow's brightness; I'm animating the Glow's dullness. Here's what I mean. I'll turn off the Y-POS Link Behavior in the Layers tab and scrub. As you can see, the ball's Glow is always on, so its normal unlinked state is to be fully glowed. Now I'll turn back on the Behavior. So that's why the Apply Link When pop-up is set to Source value outside min and max, because the Link Behavior's actually controlling when the Glow is off, not on, so when the ball gets closer to the floor the link is turned Off, in essence and the ball reverts back to full Glow. But what's making it turn off at all? You probably already guessed it. The Scale value is set to negative 5. This keeps the Glow off, or really its Opacity at zero, until the Link lets go at the min-max region. A quick look at the Layers tab shows other Y-POS Link Behaviors. The Lens Flare kicks on the same way as does the Concentric Shapes Generator. The Concentric Shapes Generator is pretty cool because the parameter to the Link Behavior's controlling is this outer cutoff right here. As I slide this you can see how the behavior can animate the radiating of its rings out and in. The rest of the animation is controlled by Link Behaviors, too. This time each group's position must match the ball's position, so a second Link Behavior is applied that tells the object or group to replace its own position values with those of the ball. I think we can all agree that the Link Behavior is the new powerhouse behavior in Motion 4.