This week on MacBreak Studio, Steve Martin from Ripple Training and I go a little “behavior crazy” as we animate a photo to look like it's been thrown onto a desk.

In Motion, almost any animation task can be accomplished in two different ways: either using traditional keyframe methods, or by applying some combination of Motion's behavior objects, which are adjustable packages of procedural animation that can be much faster and easier to use than keyframes, depending on the task.

Here, to animate a layer that needs to look like it's been thrown with both directional and angular velocity (spin), gets affected by gravity, lands on a table, and then is affected by the friction of the surface to come to a natural-looking rest, behaviors are the clear choice.

We use a lot of them in this tutorial, but I point out one in particular, for which this episode is named. Even folks very familiar with Motion may not have ever used the Clamp parameter behavior, yet in certain situations like this one, it is the key to making the animation work.