The animation studio, area by area

1First, make an animation asset

Everything you animate sits inside an asset, an asset sits inside a project, and a project sits inside your studio. Open the Create wizard from your studio and walk the three steps it gives you: pick or make a Studio, pick or make a Project, then choose the Asset. On the asset step, choose one of the animation kinds. That is the thing you will open and work in for the rest of this course.

2Open the Animation studio

Click your new animation asset to open it, and the Animation studio fills the screen. It is a workshop, not a form, so give it a second to lay itself out. You will see a big area in the middle, a strip of tools down one side, a thin bar across the top, and a timeline along the bottom. If it looks busy, do not worry, we are about to name every corner of it.

3The stage: your canvas

The large area in the middle is the stage. It is the framed rectangle a reader will actually see when your animation plays, plus the working space around it. Everything you draw, place, or pose shows up here in real position and real scale. The bright rectangle is what the audience sees; the dim border around it is off-screen working space where you can park things.

4Move around: pan and zoom

You will want to get close to a hand and then back out to see the whole shot. Scroll to zoom the stage in and out, and drag with the space bar held (or with a middle-mouse drag) to pan around. Zooming and panning only change your view, they never move your artwork or change a single frame. If you get lost, zoom back out until the framed rectangle is centred again.

5The tool palette

Down the side sits the tool palette, the strip of tools you pick from. In the main studio it is sorted into two groups: Layer tools, which move and shape whatever row is selected, and Camera tools, which move the shot itself. The Layer group holds Select, Translate, Scale, Rotate, Warp, Pose, and Points. The Camera group holds Track, Zoom, Roll, and Depth of field.

6The Tool Options bar

The thin strip across the top of the stage is the Tool Options bar, and it changes depending on which tool you have picked. Choose Translate and it shows Pos X and Pos Y so you can type an exact position. Choose Rotate and it shows Angle. On the right it always keeps four toggles: Reset, Freeze, Relative, and Auto-key. That bar is where you go from rough dragging to precise numbers.

7The add-row bar

Near the row list is the add-row bar, a line of buttons that each drop a new kind of row into your scene. The buttons are Art, Image, Tween, Vector, Character, Effect, Particles, Camera, and Audio. Each one is a different building block: Art for drawing by hand, Image for a picture, Vector for editable line art, Character for a reusable rig, and so on. You do not need all of them for every scene.

8The row list

The stack of named strips beside or under the stage is the row list, and it is the backbone of your whole scene. Each row is one layer: a drawing, a picture, a camera, a sound. The order matters, the row at the top of the list sits nearest the front, and the row at the bottom sits furthest back. Click a row to select it, and the Layer tools then act on that row and no other.

9Show, hide, name, reorder

Each row has small controls for the everyday housekeeping. You can toggle a row's visibility to hide it while you work on something behind it, and turning it back on brings it right back. You can rename a row so future-you knows what it is (an Image row starts life named Image {n}, which tells you nothing in a month). And you can drag rows up and down to change their front-to-back order.

10The timeline along the bottom

Running across the bottom is the timeline, where time and keyframes live. It has four view tabs, Frames, Channels, Sequencer, and Motion Graph, and a transport with Play and Stop. The moving line is the playhead: wherever it sits is the moment you are looking at. A readout shows Frame {n} / {total} so you always know where you are in the shot.

11The inspector panels

Depending on what you have selected, panels open with the deeper settings for that thing. Select a bone and the Bones panel appears with its Name, Parent, and Length. Add particles and the Particles panel gives you Rate, Life, and more. Panels like Actions, Switch / Lip-sync, and Shape style show up when they are relevant. They are the fine-tuning panels that open only when you need them.

12Auto-key: the recorder

One toggle deserves its own stop on the tour: Auto-key, on the right of the Tool Options bar. When it is on, any change you make to a row (a move, a scale, a pose) records a keyframe at the playhead automatically. That is how animation gets recorded: put the playhead on a frame, change something, and the change is captured there. With Auto-key off, you can adjust the rest position of things without laying down keys.

13Move and shape a row on the stage

To get a feel for the place, select a row and try the Layer tools in order. Select just picks things. Translate slides the row (watch Pos X and Pos Y in the Tool Options bar). Scale resizes it (the Scale field), and Rotate spins it (the Angle field). Warp puts a four-corner cage on the row so you can squash and skew it. Pose is for dragging bones once a row is rigged.

14The camera tools, briefly

The Camera group moves the shot rather than the puppet. Track pans the camera (Pan X and Pan Y), Zoom pushes in and pulls out (Zoom), Roll tilts the horizon (Roll), and Depth of field adds a focus blur with Focus, Range, and Strength. You need a Camera row for these to key. There is a full tutorial on the camera and parallax later, so treat this as a quick preview.

15Where this fits, and your companion page

You now know the whole layout: stage, tool palette, Tool Options bar, add-row bar, row list, timeline, inspector panels, and the Auto-key recorder. The sibling tutorial Animate in the studio is your hands-on companion, it takes this same room and actually makes a short animation in it, so read them side by side. From here, the natural next step is understanding rows, because rows are how a whole scene is built.

Questions about the studio