New Animation Editor Workflow and some bug fixes

As of today, the workflow for the Animation Editor has changed. Gone are the days of the starting screen and having to pick the proper HumanoidRootPart each time. All you need to do is simply click on the model itself (either in the viewport or in the explorer tab). As long as it has a Humanoid or Animation controller and a Motor6D rig setup, we will detect the top level joints for you.

When you open the Animation Editor screen, it will look something like this:


“Select a rig to animate” means that your current selection in studio does not have a Humanoid or an Animation Controller attached.

If you see this screen,


That means your model has a Humanoid or Animation Controller attached, but has never been opened in the animation editor before and has no existing animations. Opening any other valid model that already has existing animations will automatically bypass this screen.

Some other features/fixes with this change:

  • It is now easier than ever to switch between rigs. Simply click on another rig to start working on it. No more having to close the entire editor and then re-open.
  • All of your data that you were working on before switching to another rig will be auto-saved and loaded in again once you come back to that rig.
  • This new flow should be much friendlier with custom rigs/rigs that don’t have a HumanoidRootPart
  • We do some rig verification to make sure there are no errors with your Motor6D setup. Possible errors could be: Motor6D’s with missing Part0/Part1, Motor6D’s that are driven by two different motors, or a cyclical Motor6D setup. We will warn you if any such problems exist with the rig when you attempt to open it.
  • The editor should no longer crash when you delete the rig, it will simply just prompt you for another one
  • All popups in the animation editor are now actual popup windows that are not bound to the animation editor window. Old popups that were larger than the animation window itself would just get cutoff. They now live in their own window, so hopefully this makes keeping the editor docked a little easier for you.

Known issues:

  • Since the animation editor now considers any instance to be a candidate to be opened at any time, it may be easy to click on something outside of the model and the animation editor will try to switch context. We recommend animating the model in an isolated area if possible and maybe delete the baseplate or move it away from the model.
  • The animation editor will attempt to open for any Instance you click on in the explorer, even if it’s outside of workspace. We are working on fixing this so it only recognizes instances in Workspace
  • Any of our resizable popup windows have their default size ignored. They end up opening to a much larger size than we intend for, or being too small and end up cutting off parts of the UI. This seems to be fixed once you attempt to resize the window.
  • Remove IK message appears even though the previous rig didn’t necessarily have IK mode enabled
  • Some frame rate drops when moving camera around the model while editor is open
  • After receiving an error, the screen on the animation editor may go blank. Selecting another rig should make something appear again.
  • There is an issue with models that are not directly children of Workspace where selecting anything in the Animation Editor will switch contexts. For example, you have all of your models in a folder in Workspace. We are working to fix this ASAP

Please let us know if any other issues arise or you have any additional suggestions for how we can make this better, and we hope you enjoy the new workflow!

78 Likes

great job working on the changes and fixing bugs in the animation editor

2 Likes

Appreciate this a lot. Animating was a chore most of the time and workflow was slowed down quite a lot by many of the issues that this update addressed. Thank you!

4 Likes

Roblox studio crashes everytime I try to select the rig.

5 Likes

Can you give me more details on the rig that you are using, or perhaps send me the rig? Is this a custom rig/one that you modified or is it straight from the Rig Builder with no modifications?

2 Likes

I am using the rig from the default rig that comes with the animation editor.

2 Likes

Okay, I will investigate this now

1 Like

I see you attempted to report the bug here: Animation Editor not working?

Can you send me the full error output that studio is giving you?

2 Likes

Alright, here’s my opinion on this new animation editor and a bug report.
I like the new animation editor’s IK constraint feature, really helps you shape up those moves. But my problem is, it requires much more screen space than the legacy (older) one, and my resolution is 1366x768, this means the amount of widgets or somethings (Explorer, Game Explorer, Properties, etc.) crams my view size to like, 500x400. The old animation editor still manages to fit everything on a viewport size of like 300x250 or something. It sucks a lot for me, because well, I’m not gonna get a bigger monitor sooner or later. It really is quite buggy too, it just crashes my Studio constantly and glitches out of functionality.
This is my honest opinion, not trying to hate this too much. :huh:

3 Likes

There’s another bug that I’m willing to report soon.

1 Like

Thanks for letting me know…is there any possible way you can give me more information on the crashes you are experiencing? Such as a list of steps you are taking in order to get it to happen? Thanks!

1 Like

I wasn’t able to show the output due to Roblox Studio crashing everytime I try to record the output.

1 Like

@DoctorVasud @Mirzadaswag Could you disable all of your user plugins and then reload Studio and see if that solves the crashing? I cannot get the crashing to repro on my setup on Win10 either, so it might be that your plugin setup is causing issues. Otherwise please attach the exact rig that causes the crash and maybe record a video of what happens so they know how to reproduce the crash.

3 Likes

Disabling plugins does nothing. https://gyazo.com/841a492ec5a633fd134fd1f3607a4121 This happened though.

1 Like

I grab my rigs to animate from the rig builder,
image

Also, I get this even though I have a humanoid in the rig.

4 Likes

Making animations will be much easier, thanks. Makes saving animations easier too, especially work in progress ones. You can also now (without breaking several things) copy and paste models with animations stored in them and keep working in another place. If you have 2 animators, this is very helpful.

1 Like

Moon Animation Suite is still my choice plugin for animating, but I’ll give the update a try. The rig switching could prove useful towards animating several things at one go. Don’t have much else to say about this update.

1 Like

This isn’t a major problem, but I notice that a message will appear about an IK constraint being removed from the dummy, even though I never applied IK. This happens when I click on another part not in the dummy (1st known issue)

and then click back on the dummy to return to animating it.

2 Likes

I’m also just now noticing there’s an issue with the frame rate in the new animation editor, specifically when hovering over different parts of the dummy. This was not present in previous versions of the animation editor.


It’s hard to see in the video, but as I’m moving my camera around the dummy, it’s a lot slower because of the frame rate drops.

1 Like

Can you please add a button that allows us to ignore any Motor6D error pop-up and start animating?

Im getting this error:
https://gyazo.com/40118eaa5181542d6d53fbdb8821f348

It appears because theres another Motor6D inside Left Handle that has Part 0 and Part1 set to itself.
I do this so i can use it to later attach a weapon, etc.


Before i could normaly animate, now it just stays in disactivated state, because of the error.

Just please - add button that ignores the pop-up! Im in middle of doing something and i cant animate with anything else!

2 Likes