The scenario is this: You have an object. It might be a button on the screen, it might be a rock in your environment, it might be the camera.. lets just call it “your object.” You want to move your object between 10 different waypoints. So your object is going to change direction a lot, but you don’t want it to jerk from one point to the next. What you need to do is smooth out the movement.

Movement over Time has two very different ways to accomplish smoothing. In this post we are going to go over smoothing by effecting the value that is returned, which is done by setting Inertia and Elasticity. These values are properties of the Sequence object and together they give you a lot of power. Both of them should be set to a percentage which is represented by a float value between 0 and 1. 0 means 0% and 1 means 100%. Lets go over the difference between Inertia and Elasticity real quickly:

Inertia can be thought of as “a bias towards being inert.” If you set it to 1 then your sequence will not move. Inertia will always produce a value that lags behind the value that your effect would hold if Inertia was set to 0. Inertia will never overshoot. If your object was a boat then the path drawn by inertia would be the path of a water-skier who was being pulled behind that boat.

Elasticity is a spring function. Elasticity can bounce around, overshoot, and in some situations it can become unstable and start jumping around on the screen. Despite all that, it can be used to make some really nice effects. For instance, when your object reaches the edge of the screen you can use elasticity to make it bounce before settling down. You can also use Elasticity to make your object follow a course exactly until there’s a rapid change in direction and then it will swing around and match course with the new direction.

There is also a boolean that you can set: Sequence.StartWithVelocity. This boolean only makes a difference if Elasticity is greater than 0. When this is true the first effect will start out moving, and when it’s false the first effect will start out stopped, and then rush to catch up.

Elasticity and Inertia can be combined. In fact, if you are using Elasticity it’s usually a good idea to tamper it with a bit of Inertia so that sudden movements don’t make things fly out of control. If you set Inertia to a value that’s greater than Elasticity then your effect can become unstable, especially when the frame rate starts to drop.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind when using Inertia and/or Elasticity:

1. Since both of these types of smoothing change the value that is passed to OnUpdate, they can both end up leaving your object in a different place than the value returned by RetrieveEnd. In the case of Inertia your object will always end up somewhere behind the end value when time runs out on the effect. If you want the effect to run a little longer so that your object ends up at the end value then you can define the Effect.RunEffectUntilValue action.
2. When you’re using smoothing and going from one effect to another inside a sequence it’s important to remember that you don’t generally want to start the next effect at the current value of your object. Instead, you want to start the next effect at the last end value. If you are running an effect with smoothing and you notice your object “hopping back” or “appearing to hit a wall and then going on” then this is probably the cause. Use lastEndValue rather than the current position of your object.