After Effects Auto Orient Flips When Stopping Motion

[BradH34]

I have comp of an animal walking, then stopping, then walking again.  I'm keyframing the comp position and using auto orient to keep him facing the correct direction.  When he stops walking I keyframe the position and keyframe again at the end of his pause using the same position.  When he starts walking again, I resume keyframing his position.  During the time that he's not walking (no movement), the auto orient flips him in the wrong direction.  How can I stop the flip flopping?

[kglad]

<moved from using the community >

[Mylenium]

This is to be expected. It's in the name - when there is no motion there's nothing to orient towards. You need to split up the layer and to get a good behavior you have to make the movement slightly longer and animate the opacity to "switch" the layers on and while getting stable orientation. At the same time the standing segment would be separate with no auto-orient used.

Mylenium 

[BradH34]

That's what I was afraid of.  I got that to work as a workaround, but was hoping for an easier solution or an expression that would solve the problem.  Thanks for the reply.

[Rick Gerard]

If you are getting a flip when you duplicate the last keyframe, just move back one keyframe and change it to a hold keyframe. That will sove your problem. 

You can also use a vector path (mask or shape layer) as a motion path by using the Create Nulls From Paths script under the Window Menu, choose Trace Path, then animate the Progress to get your animal to move along a path with proper orientation. All you ave to do is Shift + parent your Animal layer to the Path Null.

[BradH34 · Accepted solution]

Thank you Rick.  I figured it out.

In order to have him face the correct way along the path, I had to rotate him 180 degrees.  When I stopped his motion, he wanted to go back to no rotation (facing the wrong way).  I pre-comped him, rotated him 180 degrees in the pre-comp, and when I keyframe his position in the main comp, he works perfectly.

I was trying your hold frame trick and it wasn't working, which led me to figure out what was happening, so thank you!