We are excited to announce a major upgrade to how Roblox developers compose and craft the animations that bring characters and objects to life on the platform. Just as we did with the Terrain Editor (http://wiki.roblox.com/index.php?title=Intro_To_Terrain), we are rearchitecting Studio’s Animation Editor to utilize our new Lua Plugin Framework (Introduction of Lua Widgets) so that it feels more integrated with Studio. At the heart of this upgrade are two key enhancements:
The UI has been completely redesigned in an effort to make animation easier and more intuitive.
The Animation Editor now lives in its own panel which can be moved around and docked so that it doesn’t interfere with the main viewport.
Whether you are a veteran animator, or have never even seen this part of Studio before, we think you will all be wow’ed by the changes. Just take a look:
While making the sweeping changes above, we took the opportunity to address feedback we have been hearing from the community for some time. These changes include:
Common media control buttons have been added for play, pause, next key, previous key, start key and end key. Also, controls for setting animation length and current time have been moved out of drop down menus
The Scrub bar now moves when the animation is playing
Sections of the current animation track can be zoomed into, and the zoomed into track can be scrolled through
The hierarchy of joints is shown in a tree where any branch is collapsible
Joints can be manipulated with drag handles, as well as directly inputting position and rotation values
Position and rotation values can be viewed updating in real-time when the animation is playing
Familiar windows style right click and drop down menus
Keyboard controls for cut, copy, paste, undo, redo, play, pause
Bug fixes to all areas of the editor
Coming soon: scrubbing an animation will use Roblox’s run-time in-game animation system, so no discrepancies between what you create in the Animation Editor and what ends up playing in game
As always, we thrive on your feedback. Check out the latest build of Studio, try your hand with our new Animation Editor, and then come back and tell us what you think in the comments below.
If I grab the scrub bar and drag my mouse outside of the timeline area (i.e. the sidebar / off-window) and release the mouse button, the scrub bar still thinks I’m holding onto it when I move my mouse back onto the timeline.
These two buttons don’t seem to do anything when clicked (occurs sometimes, not all the time) and these messages seem to mismatch the rest of the design of the widget:
It’s a very small gripe, I just prefer having a larger interface.
Overall, it’s a fantastic improvement.
Also, here’s a suggestion for the new animation plugin: Create an option to “pose” characters, so keyframes aren’t reset when you re-open the place file.and also an option to remove the Grid for thumbnails and character art.
How do we copy a keyframe? I can’t seem to be able to copy the entire keyframe unless I select a pose individually and copy it over to the next keyframe.
I like the new upgrade from the old editor. I am not much of an animator myself but can see others learning how to animate finding this tool to be very useful and handy.
Everyone involved with getting the new animation editor shipped:
Awesome job! You’ve outdone yourself. Keep up the great work. Thanks for fixing one of the larger issues in every developers workflow
I believe this is as a result of the UI constraint instances that are being used to organize the individual UI elements. They seem to have some sort of delayed update frequency for performance I assume.
