Ending Transitions in Layerslider 7.5 and Onwards
LayerSlider 7.5 was a massive update with many new features like text mask effects, transition presets, layer transition mirroring, new slide transitions, and more. However, this post is dedicated to a smaller change that’s still important to discuss. With LayerSlider 7.5, we’ve changed how Ending Transition and Ending Text Transition behave, which can affect projects you’ve already built and might result in layers never animating out and stockpiling on each other.
Background
For quite some time now, LayerSlider has been following the logic that layers should have an opening transition to become visible and an ending transition to disappear. Simple enough. However, LayerSlider also had a safety check and a hidden mechanism to force layers out at the end of slides unless they were explicitly static layers. It made sense in almost every case but was inconsistent and a deviation from how the slider should work. After all, the option to disable ending transitions is there, and it should have a meaningful effect.
New Behavior
In the latest versions, layers without ending transitions will remain in the scene and act like static layers. This might be strange at first, but it’s only logical that if a layer has no ending transition, then it shouldn’t disappear. Not even at the end of the slide.
More on Slides
By the way: slides. Allow us to go on a quick tangent here. Slides in LayerSlider are different from what you probably think they are. They are more like animation scenes with the function to separate animation sections and clear up workspace clutter when working with numerous layers. They are named slides for clarity, and, of course, you can absolutely use them in the way you’ve always thought of them. LayerSlider heavily encourages that so they conform to user expectations. However, layers are not tied to their origin slide, and they exist across all slides, giving the plugin extreme flexibility. Under the hood, layers can come and go whenever they want, and when you’re using static layers, you essentially specify their exit point. Knowing that everything is in the background at all times, just waiting for an action to do something, we hope you better understand why a layer without an ending transition should remain in the scene and never animate out.
Implications
This change should not affect projects built correctly. Layers have an ending transition by default, which eliminates possible issues. However, if you’ve disabled both Ending Transition and Ending Text Transition for your layers, then it was likely an incorrect step. They only worked as expected in the past because the above-mentioned safety check forced them out of the scene at the end of slides anyway. The result in such a case with the new changes would be layers starting to stockpile on each other and never animating out.
the Empire.
the Empire.
How to Fix
LayerSlider 7.7, our next big update, will be released in a few days, and it’ll automatically detect this issue and prompt you to fix it with a single click of a button.
Alternatively, you can manually adjust all layers on a slide with multiple selection mode. Range-select your layers in the layers list by holding down the key, then choose the Ending Transition option from the transition dropdown list to enable it with the switch below. You need to repeat this for every slide in your project.
One More Thing
Throughout this post, we’ve referenced “ending transitions” in a plural form. It’s because we have two separate ending transitions. Ending Transition is the default transition type you’d use in most cases. Ending Text Transition serves the same purpose, but instead of animating the whole layer, it splits textual content into chars, words, or lines depending on your selection and animates each fragment independently. What’s important is that it’s enough to have either one of them enabled for layers to animate out.
Closing Thoughts
The issue discussed is not a bug but a logical behavior to keep transition functions consistent. It affects only a handful of special cases where any strangeness directly results from how layers are configured. Most of you reading this don’t need to change anything. We only received a few reports on this and thought we’d share more on the subject. We hope this post was helpful in avoiding unexpected cases like this and providing a bit more understanding of the inner workings of LayerSlider.