How to push two view controllers but animate transition only for the second one?

Question

I have three controllers (FirstVC, SecondVC, ThirdVC) inside storyboad, and navigation is sequential: a user can navigate from FirstVC to SecondVC, and then to ThirdVC. Now,

Answer 1

Hmm perhaps just write a custom segue that doesn't do any animations an make sure the segue in the storyboard references your segue class.

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/featuredarticles/ViewControllerPGforiPhoneOS/CreatingCustomSegues/CreatingCustomSegues.html

Link above to how to create it, docs IMO are fairly self explanatory. You can then customise how you segues work and appear.

Other options include the new protocols introduced in iOS7 assuming you don't want to support older devices.

Watch the Apple Tech Talks 2014 video "Architecting Modern Apps part 1" they demo it on there.

https://developer.apple.com/tech-talks/videos/

There are many solutions to your question hopefully one of the above is helpful, let me know if it's not and I'll propose another.

UPDATE:

Another option would be to use a tav view controller perhaps if this fits in with your needs as you could add a navigation controller to one of the tabs to achieve this or swap tabs as needed.