Tip of the Week: Creating Custom Motion Paths for Animation

Mike Rankin

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Now that you can use InDesign’s animation tools to bring content alive in EPUB and Publish Online projects, it’s worth spending some time getting acquainted (or re-acquainted) with the cool stuff you can do. For example, did you know you can convert just about any paths into custom motion paths that define the behavior of animated objects?

In order to help our brave little dot get out of this maze, you can draw an escape route with the Pen tool.

Then select both the dot and the path you just drew, and at the bottom of the Animation panel, click the button for Convert to Motion Path.

From there, you can tweak the duration, timing, trigger event, etc., or click the motion path and edit is as you would any path, using the Pen tool and selection tools, until you have the perfect path to unite these two lonely objects in holy dotrimony.

Bonus tip: want to convert a motion path back to a regular path? Don’t click the trash can on the Animation panel. That deletes the path. Instead, click the motion path to select it, then cut it and paste it in place (Command+Shift+Option+V on Mac Ctrl+Shift+Alt+V on Windows).