Animated movement often seems much more natural and realistic if the moving object accelerates up to speed or decelerates before stopping. The technique of adding that change in velocity is called Easing. You can imagine that the acceleration to speed, and the deceleration would create a curve when plotted as distance against time, and in fact in prior versions of Expression Blend that curve was often hand drawn as shown in the following two images,
Image 1 – Starting to set Easing
Image 2 – Adding In Easing
Typically this was presented to the developer as follows “… and then you want to drag this over a bit to add some easing and make things more realistic…”
The typical developer’s reaction was….
perhaps somewhat less than what the designer might have hoped for.
In Expression Blend 3 Easing is much more intuitive, starting with a drop down menu that acts as a menu for the most common types of easing used, with each pre-defined and illustrated as shown here:
Among the predefined easing formulae are spring and bounce; adding these to your animation can provide tremendously enhanced realism.
A review of this topic can be found in the mini-tutorial Easing Is Easier and a new video is available as well.
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