Animate a Vector Character

1From rig to performance

Everything so far built the rig; now you animate with it. Animating means setting the character's pose at key moments in time, called keyframes, and letting the rig fill the motion between them. Your job is to choose the strongest poses and place them at the right frames. The rig does the in-betweening, so animating here is mostly posing and timing.

2Switch to Animate mode

Turn Rig off and put the studio into Animate mode. The banner confirms it: in Animate mode, posing sets keys at the playhead, so this is where a performance actually gets recorded onto the timeline. Rig mode shaped the rest pose and touched nothing on the timeline; Animate mode is the opposite, everything you do lands as animation at the current frame. Make sure you are here before you start posing, or your changes will not key.

3Turn on Auto-key

In the Tool Options bar, switch on Auto-key. With it enabled, every pose change you make drops a keyframe at the current frame automatically, so you can focus on posing instead of manually setting keys. This is the natural way to animate a rig: move the playhead to a frame, pose the character, and the key records itself. The Pose tool's own hint says it plainly, drag a bone on the stage and it keys at the playhead while Auto-key is on.

4The Pose tool

The Pose tool is your main instrument for animating a rig. Select it in the Tool Options bar, then drag any bone on the stage to move it: rotate a bone directly, or grab the tip of an IK limb to pull the whole chain into place. With Auto-key on, each drag keys that bone at the playhead. This one tool, plus the playhead, is how you strike every pose in the shot, so spend a minute getting the feel of dragging bones and IK tips.

5Plan the shot before you pose

Do not just start dragging bones and hope. Decide what the shot is: a wave, a jump, a line of dialogue with a gesture. Picture the two or three strongest poses that tell that story, the moments a viewer would freeze-frame, and roughly when they happen. A shot is mostly its extremes, the fully wound-up pose and the fully released one; nail those and the middle largely takes care of itself. A minute of planning saves a lot of aimless keying.

6Block the extremes first

Now block. Move the playhead to the frame of your first key pose and use the Pose tool to strike it fully, with Auto-key recording it. Jump the playhead to the frame of the next extreme and pose that one. Keep going for each major pose in the shot, ignoring the in-betweens entirely. This gives you a rough, poppy version made only of the strongest moments, the skeleton of the performance, which you will refine rather than rebuild.

7Preview your blocking

Before refining, watch it. Hit Play in the transport to loop the shot and read the timing of your extremes; Stop when you have seen enough, and use Previous keyframe and Next keyframe to hop between your poses. The Frame {n} / {total} readout tells you where you are. Previewing early and often is the single best habit in animation, it catches a limp pose or a dead beat while it is still one key to fix.

8Refine the timing

With the extremes reading well, sharpen the timing. In the Frames timeline, slide keyframes closer together to make a move snap or further apart to make it glide, and use Insert frames to open room when a beat needs to breathe (it shifts everything after it later). A pose held a beat longer can land a joke; a fast in-between can add a crack of energy. Timing, not more poses, is what separates a stiff shot from a lively one.

9Add breakdowns between the extremes

Between two strong poses, the rig draws a straight, mechanical path unless you guide it. Add a breakdown pose partway between to shape how the character travels from one extreme to the next, an arc for a waving hand, a dip and rise for a step, a little overshoot before a settle. Move the playhead between your keys, strike the in-between pose, and Auto-key records it. Breakdowns are where the character's personality actually lives.

10Fire smart bones as you go

All those smart bones you built now pay off. As you pose a limb, rotate its Control bone and the smart bone blends in the clean fold you recorded, so a bending elbow or knee stays clean without any hand-fixing. Trigger a blink or a fist-clench the same way, by turning its control bone at the right frame. Because smart bones respond to bone rotation and Auto-key records that rotation, they animate right alongside everything else you pose.

11Switch mouths for dialogue

When the character talks, drive the mouth with the Switch / Lip-sync panel, which shows one drawn mouth sub-layer at a time. Move the playhead to a frame and click the shape tile for the sound being made, it shows that mouth and keys it at that frame (the panel reads Frame {n}). Work through the line syllable by syllable, and the Keyed frames strip shows your mouth keys so far; click a chip there to clear one you placed wrong.

12Layer in secondary motion

The main action is posed; now let the body follow through. Any bones you set as Dynamic, hair, tails, coat-tails, sway and settle on their own as the character moves, so you get free secondary motion without keying it. For anything not dynamic, add small offset poses so a scarf or a hand lags a frame behind the body it hangs from. This overlap, where different parts arrive slightly out of sync, is what makes motion feel like flesh rather than a rigid block.

13Polish with onion skin and stepped preview

For the final pass, turn on the Onion eye to see ghost frames of the poses before and after (past ghosts show red, future ghosts green with the forward stepper), so you can smooth arcs and spacing precisely. Toggle stepped playback with On 1s, On 2s, or On 3s to check how the shot reads holding each drawing for one, two, or three frames. Scrub with Previous keyframe and Next keyframe and clean up any pose that pops.

14Preview the finished shot

Do a full watch with fresh eyes. Turn on Loop, hit Play, and let the whole shot run several times. Ask the plain questions: does it read clearly, does the timing land, does the character feel alive, is there a dead beat or a stiff joint. Fix what nags you, then watch again. A shot is finished not when you run out of things to do but when another pass would not make it noticeably better.

15Publish so readers can watch

To get the shot to an audience, use Publish. A published animation plays inline for readers right in the feed, and an eligible one can become a Short. Publish is the real finish line here, not a file export: it is how the performance reaches people. There is also an in-engine frame and Animated GIF exporter for stills and loops, but Publish is the path that puts your animation in front of readers as something they can actually watch and share.

Animating questions