How to rotate something in photoshop timeline animation?

[noahshipman]

Hello all,

This may seem like an extremely amateurish question but today I've been having the hardest time making an animation of a person walking using keyframes in photoshop timeline animation. Basically, I want each leg component to rotate every time he takes a step, and for the position of the leg component to change as he's moving forward. Bottom line: I want to animate the rotation and position of a layer.

I set my keyframes up accordingly, and the position animated just fine, but I'm having serious trouble with the rotation. I move my ticker over the keyframe, hit ctrl+T, and rotate, but the rotation is applied to the entire animation and not just that keyframe. I'm so confused.

Then I tried, in the timeline panel, changing the motion from "custom" to "rotate", but the problem this time was that when i tried rotating it, it disregarded my anchor point no matter where I dragged it to and just rotated around the middle. Is it because I am trying to animate the rotation AND the position that's making it complicated?

Please help!

[Chuck Uebele · Accepted solution]

Are you using smart objects? They retain the transformation information when dealing with timelines.

[Ruthwik24083601mape]

this is it, thank you so much!

[Henrylee1612]

So what's the solution?

[Chuck Uebele]

Putting the clip into a smart object.

[Trevor.Dennis]

Are you asking about a video or frame animation timeline?

Both have layers, or in a video timeline, groups that contain one or more layers.

Select the clip or frame you want to rotate.  This will make the relevant layer become selected.

Use Free Transform to rotate the layer.

You can do it with just one layer with a frame animation, in which case it is important to select the frame.

It's a bit more complicated with video timelines, so let us know if that is what you are asking about.  And I, or someone else, will show you how. 

[Trevor.Dennis]

I see JJ gave the answer back in 2017.  We lost JJ a year or three ago, so I always love to see his answers pop up again.

[JJMack]

Rotate 3d layers in a video timeline. http://www.mouseprints.net/old/dpr/Insidelight.mp4

For a warking  animation, Create a Frame animation and a layer for each frame.  Try duping a layer and using puppet warp to move/change your characters body movement.,