Automate Without Scripts

1What you actually want to automate

When animators script, they are usually chasing one of a few things: making one control drive several parts at once, generating secondary motion so they do not hand-key every wobble, folding a complicated pose onto a single dial, or reusing a chunk of motion in many places. Notice that none of those actually requires code, they require the right built-in rig features. This page maps each of those wishes to a native tool, so you get the automation without the console. You automate the app using its own built-in tools.

2No scripting here

Plainly: there is no Lua scripting console in the browser studio. Scripting is a desktop-only surface, so there is no place to write, load, or run a script, and no automation macro language. Do not go hunting for a code panel or a script menu, because there is not one, and knowing that up front saves you a frustrating search. Everything you would have scripted, you build with the rig tools instead.

3Your native automation kit

Four built-in features do the work a script would. Control bones let one bone automatically drive another's angle, scale, or position. Smart bones fold a whole recorded pose onto a single dial you can turn. Dynamic bones automate physical motion like bounce and sway. And Actions record a motion once and stamp it onto the timeline wherever you need it. Learn these four and you have replaced the scripting console with something you can actually see and drag.

4Control bones: one bone drives another

A control bone makes one bone move automatically whenever another bone moves, the classic use for a driver script. In the Bones panel you point a bone at a driver using Angle from, Scale from, or Position from, each paired with a Ratio. Now that bone follows its driver by the ratio you set, with no keys of its own. It is a live link: turn the driver, and the driven bone responds instantly and forever.

5Angle from: automatic rotation

Set Angle from to a driver bone and the current bone rotates automatically as that driver rotates. This is how you make a jaw drop as the head tilts, or an eyebrow raise as an eye widens, without keying both. Tune the Ratio so the follow feels right: a small ratio gives a subtle sympathetic tilt, a large one makes the driven bone swing dramatically. Because the link is live, it holds across the whole scene automatically.

6Scale from and Position from

The other two drivers work the same way on different channels. Scale from makes a bone grow or shrink as its driver scales, handy for a squash that ripples through connected parts, or a balloon that puffs as a pump bone pushes. Position from makes a bone slide as its driver moves, good for a lever or a piston that must track another part. Each has its own Ratio, so you tune exactly how much of the driver's motion carries across.

7Keep drivers clean with Isolate

Control-bone setups get messy if a driven bone is also being dragged around by its parent. The Isolate from parent checkbox on a bone breaks the parent's rotational grip, so the bone only does what its drivers and its own keys tell it. Tick it on a head that should stay level while the body leans, or on a driven bone that must answer to its control link and nothing else. It keeps your automatic motion predictable instead of fighting the hierarchy.

8Smart bones: a pose on one dial

A smart bone folds an entire recorded pose onto a single control you turn, replacing a script that would pose many bones at once. Open the Actions panel, type a name into Action name, and click Add smart bone. Now you record the target pose into that action, and later, turning one control bone scrubs smoothly from the rest pose into the recorded one. One dial, one clean motion, whether that is closing a hand into a fist or crimping an elbow correctly as it bends.

9Wire the Control bone and Dial range

A smart bone needs a control to turn and a range to turn through. On the smart-bone row, set Control bone to the bone you will rotate as the dial, if it reads Missing bone the row is not wired to anything yet. Then set the Dial range, the min and max in degrees (the default is 0 to 90) that map to the start and end of the recorded pose. Now rotating the control bone through that range plays your pose from beginning to end and back.

10Record the smart-bone pose

With the smart bone wired, record what it should do. Rotate the control bone to the far end of its Dial range, then pose the bones into the target shape, the fist, the corrected elbow, the raised brow, so the rig learns that at full dial it looks like this. Return the control bone to the start and the pose eases back to rest. The smart bone now interpolates between rest and your recorded pose across the whole range, smoothly and automatically.

11Dynamic bones: physical motion, automated

For the automation that mimics physics, hair lag, jiggle, sway, you do not script a simulation, you tick Dynamic on a bone. It then trails and springs on its own as the character moves, with Stif, Damp, and Inert shaping the spring. This is genuine hands-off automation: you animate the main pose, and the loose bits follow through by themselves. It fully covers the secondary-motion tasks people used to script physics for.

12Actions: stamp reusable motion

When you want to reuse a whole chunk of motion, a wave, a walk cycle, a signature bounce, you record it once as an Action and stamp it wherever you like. In the Actions panel, type into Action name, click Add action, record the motion, then hit Apply on that row to stamp its keyframes onto the timeline at the playhead. That is the scripting job of a reusable motion macro, done by recording once and applying many times.

13Combine them into a smart rig

The real power is stacking these. A well-built rig might use Angle from control bones for sympathetic secondary motion, a couple of smart bones for the hand and the blink, Dynamic bones on the hair and tail, and a library of Actions for the walk and the wave. Set that up once and the character practically animates its own details while you focus on the acting. That is exactly the labour-saving a scripter chases, assembled from panels instead of code.

14What good looks like, and the gap

A well-automated rig feels effortless to pose: secondary motion happens on its own, one dial gives you a clean fist, the tail follows through, and reused motions drop in with a single Apply. The one gap is that there is no arbitrary code, so anything truly custom and logical, a rule no driver, dial, or spring can express, is not available in the browser studio. In practice that gap is small, because control bones, smart bones, dynamics, and Actions cover the overwhelming majority of what animators automate.

Automation questions