Keyframes Animate Everything Around Me

[GeneralRelish]

Hi Developers,

Are you feeling animated? You will after this post. We’ve completely overhauled the Studio animation editor and have a basket of goodies available for you. These are available to everyone today from the File → Beta Features menu; they’ll roll out as the defaults in a few weeks. On to the party!

STRAIGHT UP GOODNESS
We’ve made a few improvements under the hood. These won’t change the current animation workflow but will make your experience much better!

DAZZLING PERFORMANCE
Performance of the editor has been vastly improved. You can now import mocap animations and work with them directly in Studio. Large sets of keyframes can also be selected and scaled instantly.

IK, YOU K, WE ALL K
The IK system has been enhanced - IK chains can now be of any length and the IK system can be used on any rig in the editor (but you’ll have to make your own constraints!), not just avatar rigs. When applying IK, we will no longer overwrite any scripted constraints on the rig, so feel free to apply your own!

WORKFLOW CHANGES
We’ve also made some changes to the animation workflow, hopefully for the better!

NEW. BEAUTIFUL. POWERFUL.
A brand new, intuitive UI makes creating animations in Studio even faster. Tracks are only added when included in a keyframe, keeping the editor clean and navigable (you can optionally add all tracks if you’d like). All keyboard shortcuts (copy, paste, cut, delete, local space, undo, redo) are now identical to those you use in Studio and work 100% of the time. Adding animation events is simple - just double-click where you want to add. Transform draggers (move, rotate), can now be selected from the Studio top bar and use the increments set in Studio. Context menus have been re-designed to be more readable. CTRL+Mouse wheel to zoom; Middle mouse button+drag to pan.

ALL ABOUT THE FRAMES
We’ve made a switch from time-indexed to frame-indexed authoring and fixed the authoring to 30 FPS. This provides a greater default accuracy and ensures consistent playback of animations in game. Old animations can still be opened - they can maintain their existing keyframe placement or optionally converted to the new system. Animation length is now determined by the position of the last keyframe - no need to manually adjust the time!

None of this would have been possible without the incredible work of @ZeroIndex, @jonathanTheForgotten, @wengawenga, and @n00b3n!

Please give us your feedback for these updates to the Animation Editor below!

Known Issues

1. Easing - The EasingStyle and EasingDirection properties of keyframes can be changed from the right-click context menu, but changes do not currently take effect. Keyframes that are imported from existing animations will still maintain their EasingStyle and EasingDirection. We’ve already fixed this bug - the fix will be live in the next Studio update.
2. Local Saves - Saving an animation locally in the model tree causes Studio to run slowly. We’ve already fixed this bug - the fix will be live in the next Studio update. Saving to Roblox will avoid the issue until the fix is in.

EDIT: We’re promoting the new Animation Editor out of Beta! This is now the default Animation Editor in Studio. Details here: New Animation Editor - Out of Beta and Live for All

[Sparklings]

AAAAH!!! HAPPY DANCE!!! This overhaul is amazing, as an animator I can’t wait to start experimenting with this new system, thank you for all the hard work!

[astra_wr (astra)]

@GeneralRelish

All keyboard shortcuts (copy, paste, cut, delete, local space, undo, redo) are now identical to those you use in Studio and work 100% of the time.

As much as this shouldn’tve mattered for others, but it really does matter for me . I kept trying to cut a keyframe and ended up cutting the entire rig I’m animating.

Other than that, I’m pretty happy about this update and I’ll give it a try soon!

[Potenchill]

This is an amazing update! Can’t wait for this to come out and see all the more awesome stuff us animators can create!

[starwars5251977 (ILOVEPLOOPY)]

amazing update! although, would be nice if animations were able to be made public!

[GeneralRelish]

To clarify, this is available to everyone today from the File → Beta Features menu. You shouldn’t need to explicitly opt in to the Beta Features program.

[drager980]

K.A.E.A.M?
These are great changes. Even though I’m a scripter every work session I almost always spend an hour animating something somehow. Excited to be using these ASAP.

Did you guys fix the bug where if you are holding a camera movement key inside the animator window then move your mouse out of it the camera flies in to space uncontrollably because that was 90% of the reason I had to move to MAS.

[JollySunbro6]

We no longer track the camera movement keys in the animation editor anymore. So no, you should not encounter this issue. To resume control of the camera, just click into the viewport

[plasma_node]

Glad to hear the animation editor is getting some attention!

@GeneralRelish

We’ve made a switch from time-indexed to frame-indexed authoring and fixed the authoring to 30 FPS

I am not very familiar with animating and do not understand this. Does this mean animations are limited to 30fps instead of 60? Or am I just misunderstanding this?

Secondly, what easing methods can we use? Are we still stuck with the old ones or do we have new easing methods as well?

[RobloxiansInMotion (cameron)]

This is amazing! I can’t wait to use this, one question though! Will I still have to move all the joints to a starting position so they don’t snap into place at the key frame that they’re moved? Thanks!

[ZeroIndex]

The new editor is authored by frame, so you can place keyframes in increments of 1/30th a second. Nothing about the playback system has changed - animations should still smoothly playback on all clients by interpolating between keyframes.

[ZeroIndex]

This is something we changed with the new editor! When you create a keyframe for a track at a time other than 0 and there is no base pose at time 0, the editor automatically inserts the base pose at time 0 for you.

[kni0002]

Woah, this will definitely will make making animations so much easier and faster. Used the old animation editor couple days ago and it took so long to make a simple animation because of how slow and lacking of shortcuts and features and the editor had…

[iNaurto04 (Barry_Ill)]

Nice but, you should bring the HUD menu of the animation editor back. Trying to animate and not to memorize the hotkey is kinda hard.

[Thezi (TOJI FUSHIGURO)]

This is probably one of the best things this year, you guys have literally made it more smooth and less frustrating to use! I love how the keyboard shortcuts have been improved because sometimes I would try to copy and paste a keyframe and it would break my clipboard which would be a pia to fix. I still remember the first animation editor released by you guys and this is parsecs ahead of it.

Thank you for this it is truly incredible!

[PvN]

r6/custom (basically everything except r15) character animations do not play in-game when exported from the beta editor.

workaround is to use the beta editor to create the animation, then export it with the live editor.

[Mirzadaswag]

Last time, the animation editor BARELY fit in my 1366x768 resolution monitor, and I’m probably gonna only get a bigger one in the next few months. So hopefully the UI changes shall at least gie me enough screen resolution on the viewport. It fits terribly as a widget, and I miss the viewport UI.

This plugin takes up too much space in the viewport for me to actually do stuff

Looking on the bright side, though, at least animators can do stuff more easily. Hopefully the UI changes shall fit correctly.

[CommanderCornbread (cornbread)]

Awesome! Glad to see the animation editor getting some love. I haven’t invested much time yet into animations but I am interested in experimenting-around with the IK system.