New Settings Available in the Animation Editor

Hello developers!

We are excited to announce the addition of new settings to the Animation Editor to help you achieve more fine grained control of your animation edits. We added a new playback speed control, effectively decoupling it from the existing frame rate control, and a snap mode to more accurately move the scrubber bar during edits.

The frame rate is expressed in frames per second and defines the number of frames the Animation Editor displays for every second of real time. The playback speed is a multiplier to the frame rate and can be used to artificially increase or decrease the playback to help you inspect the movement in more detail.

These new settings are accessible the same way as the existing ones, by clicking the gear button on the right of the timeline.

animation editor

A submenu will popup showing all available settings, including the current selected values for frame rate and playback speed.

animation editor 2

Adjusting Values

Moving your mouse over the desired option will let you select from a predefined set of values commonly used for animations, or enter a custom value specific to your case. The following image shows the options available for the new Playback Speed setting.

animation editor 3

Choosing a Snap Mode

The snap mode is a convenient way of adjusting how far the scrubber bar moves when we drag it in the Animation Editor. By default the snap mode is set to move the bar from frame to frame, but we can change it to move from keyframe to keyframe as well. Setting the snap mode to None makes the bar move freely to subframe accuracy.

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This looks great. This won’t affect me much though because I don’t animate that much but when I do it will be a nice quality of life update. Also, when will this come out to the public and/or the beta program?

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It was released to the public today! You should be able to use it already :slight_smile:

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Love to see the upgrades to the Roblox Animation Editor! I would seriously like to see more improvements with the animation editor to help newer animators to get into a better use of the default animation editor and hopefully more comes soon!

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neat! i like these changes to the new animation editor

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Yea this would be great because it took me 1-2 hours to learn the basics of the Roblox animator from youtube. This update will probably make it more confusing for newer animators but for the people that know the basics, it will help make better animations.

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Do you know if there will be any major improvements to the editor like a graph or even a custom Inverse Kinematics setup?

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Has the issue been fixed where importing an animation forces it to switch to 24 fps, messing up all the keyframes for animations that where created to run at 30+ fps? This issue has been around for as long as I can remember.

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has to been new settings available with a customize for animation is update for more default animation editor should be great time for more to able animation editor

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Hey @CartoonBlur, thanks for asking! We are actually working on adding curve-based animation support to the Animation Editor. I don’t have a release timeline to share at this point, but the development is underway.

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Hi there,
The issue should be fixed with this new feature. The framerate should be treated as a grid to snap to during editing.
When loading an animation, the keys won’t align anymore if the framerate is different, which means that the animation will keep playing at its intended speed even if the Snap Mode is set to Frames.
The Snap Mode only matters when you are creating, moving, or scaling keys.

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This is great news for the built-in Roblox animator! The playback speed adjustment makes testing so much easier for animations that need to be played at different speeds (e.g. Walking, reloading weapons, etc).

However, on a mildly unrelated note, can we have an update on when the cubic easing direction will be fixed? It’s just uncompelling and inconvenient to use the default animator when such a basic problem persists.

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pog i like animation and you helped me

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Hello,
We are aware of this issue and we have looked into it, but unfortunately there is no easy solution that would guarantee that we do not break existing animations the way they are today. Some developers have intentionally used the opposite easing direction in the AnimationClipEditor so that their animations play correctly in game.
But do not fret! As @HaloArbiter_101 mentioned earlier, we are currently adding support for curve-based animations, and this will solve this problem.

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With the new update, I am unable to slow down my animation via editing FPS anymore?
Yeah, I can’t edit my animation time duration anymore.

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No.
If you want to slow down your animation just to see how it looks, without actually modifying it, then you should use the new Playback Speed option. It allows you to select how much slower (or faster) you want to preview your animation in the Animation Clip Editor, without modifying how the animation would play in-game.
If you want to change the length of your animation, you can select all keyframes, and use the scale controls to shorten, or lengthen it. If you want to make sure that all your keyframes scale exactly to 24fps, you should activate the Snap Mode to Frames and select the corresponding framerate. Hint: You can even use a custom framerate!
Hope this helps!

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Okay this is really helpful! One suggestion: when you play animations on characters that are scaled down, the animation bugs out and the movement is incredibly massive.

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This will be very helpful for animators. being able to customize fps of the animation is awesome!

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Thanks the new update enable some real smooth animation import from blender. IK for skinned mesh when?

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