Bake Expressions
You can easily Bake* the expressions to replace them by keyframes and improve the performance.
- Select the properties with the expressions.
- Click the Bake Expressions button.
You can [Shift] + [Click] the Bake Expressions button to adjust the options.
- The
Smart Mode creates less keyframes and uses Bézier interpolation* to generate an animation as close as possible of the original animation as computed by the expression.
The resulting animation may be a bit different compared to the expression, but its much easier to edit and customize later. It’s also much lighter once exported to HTML/JS/CSS animation, like Lottie/Bodymovin for example. - The
Precise Mode (a.k.a. dumb mode) creates much more keyframes, up to one per frame, but generates the exact same animation as the original one as computed by the expression.
Note
After Effects can natively bake expressions, with the Animation / Keyframe Assistant / Conver expression to keyframes tool, but it always adds one keyframe per frame.
Even with the Precise Mode, Duik is a bit smarter than that, as it only adds necessary keyframes (it adds keyframes if and only if there’s an actual movement). Duik can also optionally create more keyframes than that, which may be needed for a cleaner motion blur, or less, if it’s fine for you to use interpolations in between.
With both modes, you can adjust the Precision value to change the number of resulting keyframes.
A higher value will create more keyframes (adding keyframes in between actual frames with the Precise mode, useful for a cleaner motion blur) and increase the precision and fidelity of the animation compared to the original expression.
Warning
Be careful, the Precision is a sensitive value. Don’t raise it too much!
Tip
With the Precise mode, a value lower than 1.0 will create less keyframes than one per frame.