Guide to Material Motion in After Effects

First things first, we need assets to animate. Most of the visual designers on our team use Sketch, which by default doesn’t interface with AE. Thankfully Adam Plouff has created this plugin that adds this functionality. I used it to import our library of baseline Material components from Sketch into AE. These assets are found in the sticker sheet’s Components folder.

With this library of baseline components, new UIs can quickly be assembled by dragging them into a new AE comp.

Master properties in Ae make it possible to create a single reusable asset. The App bar is often customized by changing its Icons, colors and shadows. You can find these in the baseline UIS folder in the Download.

The examples in the navigation transitions folder illustrate a method for applying material motion patterns in after effects. To start, each property is animated without easing. The parent composition is then time Remapped to apply easing and set duration for all the nested Keyframes. This allows for quick adjustments to easing and duration since only two time Remapped Keyframes control the entire transition. This method can be used to consistently animate most transitions that use material motion principles.