Animator

In one line#

An After-Effects-shaped studio that animates 2D and 3D on the same timeline, with a graph editor for the curves and a compositor for the finish.

The layout#

The six timeline tabs#

What you do here#

Set the scene up first#

The Scene settings panel on the right is the thing to do before animating, not after:

• Canvas size: free, or a preset from 32×32 up to 1080×1920.
• Frame rate: 12, 15, 24, 30 or 60.
• Duration: in seconds, with the frame count spelled out underneath (150 frames at 30 fps), and presets from 1 s to 60 s.
• Background colour.

Changing the frame rate after you have keyframed moves every key relative to the clock. Pick it first.

Add things#

Create places shapes, text, images and 3D primitives. Objects can also arrive from other studios: a Vectra drawing, a pixel sprite, a mesh from the 3D pipeline. Auto-Rig builds a rig for a character automatically, which is the fast route to something posable.

Animate#

Layers hold objects; keyframes hold values. Add a key, move the playhead, change the value, and the in-between is generated. Animation events ride on their own track above the layers, that is what fires a sound, a particle burst or a script hook at an exact frame.

Onion skinning is on the toolbar (also in the command palette, Toggle onion skinning).

Shape the motion#

The Graph tab is where an animation stops looking mechanical. Every keyframe becomes a point on a curve with handles; easing is what you do to those handles.

Work in 3D#

The 2D/3D switch on the toolbar changes the stage, not the project. The scene settings then also cover lighting (ambient, key, fill, and an HDRI environment with specular IBL), fog, and the camera (FOV, near and far planes). Cam Key keyframes the camera; Morph Key keyframes a shape between forms.

VFX#

The VFX Builder assembles effects, and VFX clips live on the timeline like any other clip. Procedural Shape generates geometry from parameters rather than from drawing.

The right panel, fourteen tabs#

The panel on the right is not one inspector, it is fourteen:

The toolbar#

Twenty-one tools, in four families.

The 2D/3D switch sits here too, with a Mixed mode that shows 2D and 3D layers in the same viewport rather than making you choose.

Shaping the motion#

The Timeline tab says when; the Graph tab says how. Every keyframe is a point on a curve with handles, and the interpolation between two keys is one of nine modes:

linear · hold · step · easeIn · easeOut · easeInOut · bounce · elastic · spring

The last three are not eases in the CSS sense, they overshoot, which is what makes a stop read as weight rather than as an arrival.

Modifiers, the FX tab#

Forty modifiers, stacked per object, reorderable, each one toggleable without being removed. Six categories:

The Temporal and Transform families are the ones that animate on their own: a wiggle or a trail is motion you do not keyframe.

Post FX#

A screen-space stack for the whole stage, with seven presets to start from clean, cinematic, CRT, neon, glitch, dreamy, studio.

Two things the panel tells you and that are easy to miss:

• Glitch and grain animate only during playback. A still frame shows the effect, not its movement.
• Bake Light cooks the whole post-process look into the layer frames as permanent artwork, all frames or just the current one, with a Revert Bake. Until you bake, none of this is in the pixels.

The matte pipeline#

Pipeline is a reorderable stack of image steps applied to the frames, with its own cache and a Clear Cache when it goes stale. Ten steps:

grayscale · invert · luma to alpha · alpha fill · alpha fusion · colour decontaminate · premultiply · matte cleanup · smoothed alpha · alpha denoise

Run it on the current frame, on a range (from/to), or on all frames. It is the tail end of cutting a subject out of video: the AI matte produces the alpha, and these steps make it usable, colour decontaminate removes the background colour that bled into the edge, premultiply prepares it for compositing.

Rigging, in two dimensions and three#

Auto-Rig builds a rig for a character automatically. From there:

• 2D rig constraints come in three kinds. IK solves a chain between a start and an end bone (with pole targets for the elbow or knee direction); transform copies one bone's motion onto another; path makes a bone follow a curve of at least two points.
• Skinning binds a mesh to the rig, with weights you can export on their own.
• The 2D Deform Editor deforms flat artwork with a cage instead of bones the cut-out technique, for a drawing that was never built as a skeleton.
• 3D skeletons are their own schema, and BVH goes in and out.

The animation state machine#

Not the same thing as the Engine's: this one decides which clip plays.

A state carries a clip, a loop flag, a speed and a blend in milliseconds. Any State and Exit State are the two special nodes. Transitions have an exit time and a list of conditions:

Bool == true · Bool == false · Number > · < · == · >= · <= · Trigger · On Click · On Hover · Timer · Anim End

Right-click links two states; Alt-drag pans the graph.

VFX#

Three surfaces, and they are not interchangeable.

VFX Builder assembles a stack layer by layer. Stylized VFX is the 3D studio that previews it as live particle systems, it is the only preview of what the builder is producing. The preset browser ships ready-made stacks in six art directions: esports, dark fantasy, anime, ethereal, painterly, minimalist.

The 3D studio runs GPU or CPU particles, renders into a 2D plane or a 3D volume, and ships six effects to start from: explosion, fireball, impact, slash, lightning and energy ring, each with scale, duration, spark count, speed and gravity.

Effects leave the studio for other engines: Unity VFX Graph, Unreal Niagara, Babylon.js, or JSON.

Performance Capture Studio#

Record, clean and retarget body, face and hand takes, and the panel is unusually honest about what each input is worth:

⚠️ The local video analysis is a motion centroid, not body tracking. The panel says so where you would otherwise assume otherwise. For a real performance, import tracker JSON.

The workflow is four steps: calibrate a neutral pose, clean jitter and gaps, retarget onto a skeleton (which must exist first), then create an Animator clip. Coverage and confidence are reported per take. Face curves are kept in the clip metadata until morph targets are explicitly mapped, they are not silently dropped, and not silently applied either.

Beyond keyframing#

Three more studios, reachable from the toolbar and the tools column rather than from the timeline.

Cutting a subject out of video#

• Segmentation: an AI matte (BiRefNet). Run Segmentation separates the subject from its background on a video or an image.
• Edge refinement, the pass that makes that matte usable: hair, motion blur, and the semi-transparent edge the first pass gets wrong.
• Luma to Alpha turns brightness into transparency, the classic route for stock effects shot on black, and is also a step in the pipeline above.

Node graphs, procedural shapes and libraries#

A Node Graph Editor wires processing as a graph, outside the timeline where it can be reused across shots. Procedural Shape generates geometry from parameters rather than from drawing. The Animation Library stores motion for reuse, and Generated Assets collects what the procedural and AI panels have produced.

Finishing#

Compositor and Color Grading are the last two tabs of the timeline, and they are where the shot stops being a set of layers and becomes an image.

Files it reads and writes#

The native format is .avf. What leaves is a longer list than most studios here, because an animation has to land somewhere else to be worth anything:

VFX stacks have their own exits: Unity VFX Graph, Unreal Niagara and Babylon.js. Rigs export with the mesh, as a skeleton only, or as weights.

Sending work to other studios#

Produces an animation and a 2D rig. Accepts Vectra objects, pixel art, images, meshes from Sculpt, Retopo and Pigment, and 2D rigs.

The 2D rig is shared with Engine in the same form, so a character rigged here is the character the game animates, not a re-import. Animations also go to Fusion for the edit.

Working with someone else#

Animator syncs operation by operation: layers, keyframes added, deleted and moved, objects, the timeline, VFX clips, canvas frames, clips, markers.

Limits and common snags#

• Set the frame rate and duration before keyframing. Changing them later moves everything relative to the clock.
• "No objects: generate assets or add to timeline" is the empty state, not an error. Create something, or send something in.
• Easing lives in the Graph tab. The Timeline tab shows when, the Graph tab shows how.
• An animation event is not a keyframe. It sits on its own track and fires once.