You asked, we made it!

One of the most popular requests we get from professional animators is animation of individual control points in vector drawing layers—and now you can do just that! The list of changes in this update may be small, but they really pack a punch. Vector animation opens a world of possibilities. Read on for details!

What's New?

Keyframe Animation of Vector Drawing Control Points

It is now possible to animate individual points of a vector drawing layer, for results like this.

To use this feature, select any vector drawing layer, then tap Edit Points to begin editing individual points. On iPad, you can just use the regular keyframe button at this point to animate points. On iPhones and Android devices, look for a switch at the top of the screen:

This switch can be used to switch between Keyframe Editing and Contour Editing.

This setting is for Contour Editing. The standard vector drawing options will appear next to the control pad. Use this setting to create, delete, and move points to create the drawing before animating it.

This setting is for Keyframe Editing. The standard keyframe editing options will appear next to the control pad. After all the points have been created and placed in their initial positions, use this setting to animate the points by creating keyframes.

Use the control pad to position and animate points, rather than dragging in the preview.Here are some tips to help you get the most out of vector drawing animation:

• You can use the lasso gesture in the preview (introduced in 3.0) to select multiple points and then create or adjust keyframes or easing on all of them at once.
• The curve control handles can also be animated using keyframes. When you animate curve control handles, keyframes apply to both curve handles together.

Multi-Contour Vector Layers

Vector drawing layers can now have holes or be made up of multiple pieces or "contours". This is a specialized feature; normally you would just use masking groups or exclude groups to create shapes with multiple pieces. However, this makes it possible to edit the new shapes we've added in this update (see below) and can be useful when working with vector effects like Drawing Progress.

To work with this feature, tap the new Contour Menu button, located where the Open/Close Outline button used to be.

This reveals the Contour Menu.

In this menu, you can see all of the parts or Contour that make up the vector drawing. Tap any contour in the list to select it, or tap Add Contour to add a new contour to the shape.

The Open/Close button that used to be next to the control pad can be found at the bottom of the menu, as well as a new button to toggle between Fill and Difference mode for a contour (in fill mode, the contour is completely filed in; in difference mode, places where one contour overlaps another are punched out to make a hole). There is also a button to delete contours.

Note:  The base contour, Contour 1, is special. It cannot be deleted or set to difference mode. We may relax this restriction in future versions of Alight Motion.

Tip: You can also tap a contour directly in the preview to select it.

New Shapes

We've added several new built-in shapes, including the often-request person and woman shapes for making infographics.

In addition, the Postage Stamp shape, which has long been available on Android, is now also available on iOS (how did we miss that??)

This is a live shape, so there are lots of settings you can adjust.

Convert Text to Outline (iPhone/iPad)

On iPhone and iPad, text layers now support the "Convert to Outline" option to convert a text layer into a vector drawing layer.

New Effect: Bend

The new Bend effect, found in the Distortion/Warp category, bends a layer along a circular arc.

It's very simple to use...

Just choose the origin (the "fixed") point of the layer (in the above example, it's the bottom) and then adjust the angle. Use keyframe animation with angle to make an animation like the one above.

New Effect: Glow Scan

The new Glow Scan effect, found in the Edge category, renders glowing bands based on a layer's luminance, by blurring and applying a smooth glow to portions of the layer define by a band (or range) of luminance values.

Animate the Threshold parameter for some interesting results.

Parameters such as Smoothing, as well as the Radius of the luminance band can be adjusted to find tune the effect.

With the right contrast characteristic in the original photo or video, other result can also be achieved, such as the glint of light on water.

In the last example, we used Chroma Key and a garbage matte to exclude everything except the water from the effect. Glow Scan can be combined with other effects for a wide variety of interesting results!

What's Changed?

Fixed: Gaussian Blur Preview & Export Inconsistency

In previous versions of Alight Motion, the strength of Gaussian Blur could be different between the preview while editing and the final exported video. This has been fixed to ensure that the exported video matches what you see in the preview. However, this may affect how existing projects that use Gaussian Blur appear when exported. If so, you may need to adjust the blur strength on your existing projects.

Fixed: Border Size in Preview & Export Inconsistent

In previous versions of Alight Motion on Android, the width of borders shown in the preview while editing was sometimes different from the width of borders in the final exported video. This has been corrected, but if you have projects that use borders, those projects may need to be adjusted.

Fixed: Trimming Groups with Audio (iPhone/iPad)

In previous versions of Alight Motion on iPhone/iPad, if you had a group that contained audio, and trimmed the group, the audio in the group would not be trimmed and continue to play beyond the end of the group on the timeline. This has been fixed.

Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements

As usual, this version of Alight Motion also comes with many other bug fixes and performance improvements as we continue to fine-tune the technology. As always, thank you to our amazing users for your fantastic feedback and bug reports.