The Role of Start and End Properties

Well, okay, so in versus start, nothing other than I want them drawn from left to right, and that's the order I make the paths in. I have no answer other than that. So technically, you could animate start to end or end to start.

The way I drew all the paths though, I drew them from left to right. So that's the starting point, that's the ending point. When you animate end, what happens is you're pulling the end of the shape back to the beginning, and it kind of writes on from left to right.

But that's merely because that's the direction I drew the path in. If I had drawn the path in the other direction, I'd have to animate to the property to do it. So notice that that's the start of the line.

And when I go to accuse A, that's the start of the path, that's the start of the path. When I physically made the mass, same thing with M, when I did the M, by the way, I started it there. When I made the path, that is technically the start of the path.

The start of the path corresponds to the start of the effect. So this is there, end is there. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. So what did we animate yesterday with start and end? So, okay.

So then keep in mind, by the way, so don't get hung up on the names of the properties. That's the first problem, okay? So these are properties, like color, brush size, start, end. So do not get hung up on the name of the properties.

Because even though this is called start and end, and the text Animator also had a start and end, they don't necessarily mean the same thing. Yeah. That's the thing to keep in mind.

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It's like, yes, this is called start and end, and other properties are also called start and end, but they mean to have nothing to do with each other, okay? So here, start specifically refers to the start of the path, the beginning of the path, the first point on the path. Okay. So let me actually just make a sample for this.

Okay. If I make a solid layer, for example, and I make a path, point one, I'll make a zigzag, like that. Okay.

That is the first part of the path, second, third, sorry, make it, I mean, like that, right? Now, when an effect like stroke hits this, I'm going to do this on transparent. I'm going to raise that a bit. When an effect like stroke hits this, the program's concept is the first point equals the start of the path.

The last point equals the end of the path. If I want to animate this so that it grows from left to right, I would take end and pull it back to the beginning, like that. Now when it animates, that's the direction from point, first point to end, from start to end.

Okay. But if I wanted the exact opposite, maybe I want this to be where it starts and it to go up. I would actually take start, change its initial value to a hundred percent.

So basically is at the end of the line. And then I would animate it down to zero. So it grows in this direction.

So start and end really just control the direction that your stroke is appearing in. And that's all. Okay.

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For a path, anything that's attached to a path normally reads the first anchor point as the start and the last anchor point is the end. Now, yesterday we animated the start property of the range selector. So even though, again, it's also called start and end, it's a completely different property, even though it has the same name.

Okay. For text, like that, when an Animator is added to it, okay, the range selector also has a start, which is usually the beginning of the text and an end, which is the end of the text. Again, they control the direction of animation.

If all my text is zero percent opacity in the Animator, start would let the S appear first, then the T and A, the RT, right? If I animated end, which would be animate going a lower number, it would animate from the other side, that direction. That's all start and end do. They control the direction of the animation, depending on what it is.

So for a path, it's always from the first created anchor point. For a range selector, it's from the beginning of text to the end of text. But there's a lot of properties, there's a lot of effects that have some kind of start and end concept.

So that's the thing. Could we have animated the text yesterday, animating from right to left? Yes. I just didn't want that.

I admit that. And for the write-on effect, since in general the letters are written from left to right, that's why we animated that way, to follow the normal direction that something would appear in. But if it wasn't text, it was that line, then you would animate it in whatever direction was convenient to you.