Use Motion Guide to drive a car

MotionGuideToDriveCar100x100 In this tutorial you will learn how to use the Motion Guide to animate a car, drive it on the road

 

Step 1:  Create a new document and press Ctrl-J to open Document Properties dialog, set your document to 450px width and 192px height to fit with the road image

 

MotionGuideToDriveCar1

 

Next you will need to find two images car and road or use the images below

 

Car:

car.gif

Road:

road

(A cute image, right?)

 

Step 2: Go to File>Import>Import to Library and select these images from the dialog. Press Ctrl-L to open up the Library panel if you don't see it

MotionGuideToDriveCar2

Step 3: Place the road image on Layer 1 (the image has the same dimensions as your document), rename this layer Road. Create a new layer and place your car on the right hand side of the road image

MotionGuideToDriveCar3

 

Step 4: Use the Free Transform Tool(Q) to rotate our car to fit with the road

 

 MotionGuideToDriveCar4

 

Step 5: Create a new Motion Guide layer and use the Pen Tool(P) to draw a path like this (its color is not important)

 

 MotionGuideToDriveCar5

 

Step 6: Click on frame 45 and press F6 to place a keyframe there, repeat this step with car and road layers 

 

MotionGuideToDriveCar6

 

Step 7: Click on the frame 45 of the Car layer and move our car to the left hand side of the road. Use the Free Transform Tool to rotate our car a bit

 

MotionGuideToDriveCar7

 

Step 8: Right click on any frame between 0 and 45 of the car layer and select Create Motion Tween. Now you can press Ctrl-Enter to test your result. Notice that you will see our car moving along the path but its direction is not correct

 

Click on frame 4 of Car layer and press F6 to place a keyframe here, then select the Free Transform Tool to rotate it a bit

 

MotionGuideToDriveCar8

 

Repeat this step with some other frames. You can see my process below

 

MotionGuideToDriveCar9

 

MotionGuideToDriveCar10

 

MotionGuideToDriveCar11

 

Now press Ctrl-Enter to see your result!

 

 

You can use other effects to smoothen the animation. Hope you like this tutorial!