New Animation Editor Announcement

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:

  1. The UI has been completely redesigned in an effort to make animation easier and more intuitive.

  2. 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:

Before:

After:

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.

142 Likes

ah yes very M o d e r n indeed if i do say so myself

10 Likes

This new animation editor looks really sleek! I can’t wait to use it!

4 Likes

now that is spicy

4 Likes

Really hot stuff. :eyes:
Was the issue with keyframes randomly getting “corrupted”, causing animations to make incorrect jerky motions when played, fixed?

When do we get IK in the animation editor?

6 Likes

This is a great improvement from the recent versions, really like it!
Though, there’s two things that bothered me from the start:

  • Window snaps to join the studio UI
  • Window isn’t slightly transparent anymore

I can’t get used to working with a screen that looks like this:

IMG

Would it be possible to enable/disable these things as additional settings?

6 Likes

It’s a dock widget…You can just drag it to be free from the entire window.

2 Likes

I’m not aware that that issue has been specifically addressed with this Animation Editor update.

1 Like

Yes, although my window view isn’t that very big, so having it float there without any transparency is slightly irritating in my opinion.

4 Likes

We’re still working on it, so we can potentially add new settings for some features.

2 Likes

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:

Some text is hard to read:

1 Like

This is a problem I noticed.

My screen resolution is 1920 x 1080, and the text and everything else is very, very tiny. :stuck_out_tongue:


It’s a very small gripe, I just prefer having a larger interface. :stuck_out_tongue:

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.

2 Likes

It’s great, but I’ve found some odd things.


https://streamable.com/r7aqr
The text is super jiggly.



The Load/Save windows are different UI styles than the Easing Options window.

the Load/Save dialog also gets cut off when the window is at certain sizes. In this case snapped to the bottom of my screen.



The default timeline is set to 0.4, but the actual timelines stretches to 1 second. I got super confused when I couldn’t pan past 0.4 seconds.


https://streamable.com/nug6t
The joint properties for rotation and position also seem to reset to 0 once you release the drag handles.


And like @fireking100489 said, the text pretty small on some the elements. It’s pretty hard to read on a 1440p monitor.

1 Like

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.

9 Likes

I want to see a dark theme of this

14 Likes

You can’t copy an entire keyframe, just individual poses. This is definitely something we can look into changing though.

12 Likes

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 :slight_smile:

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.

It’s acceptable on 4k, just a bit tiny. Copying full keyframes was a huge part of my workflow :confused:

5 Likes