Frame-by-frame Layers

1What frame-by-frame really means

Frame-by-frame animation is exactly what it sounds like: you draw each frame of motion as a separate picture, then play them in order fast enough to fool the eye. Nothing is posed or tweened for you here, the movement is entirely in your drawings. That is more work than a rig, but it buys you total control and that hand-made wobble that rigs never quite fake. It is the right tool for smoke, splashes, a face pulling a wild expression, or any effect that is easier to draw than to build.

2Add an Art row

Open the Animation studio and look at the add-row bar along the top. Click Art to drop in a hand-drawn row, this is the row where every frame holds its own drawing. Give it a clear name in the row so a scene full of rows does not turn into a guessing game. You can stack several Art rows if you want, say one for the character and one for an effect, and they play together layered front to back.

3Draw this frame

Put the playhead on the frame you want, then hit Draw this frame to open the drawing surface for that exact frame. Rough your first pose loosely, do not neaten it yet, you are only finding the shape. When you step the playhead forward and use Draw again, you get a fresh blank frame to draw the next drawing into. Each frame is independent, so what you draw at frame 4 has nothing to do with frame 5 until you draw it there too.

4Read the Frames timeline

Down at the bottom, the timeline view tabs let you switch how you see your scene. Stay on the Frames tab for hand-drawn work, it lays every frame out left to right so you can see which frames have drawings and which are holding. The playhead is your current frame, and the readout Frame {n} / {total} tells you where you are and how long the scene is. Click along the Frames strip to jump the playhead anywhere.

5Rough the keys first

Do not animate straight ahead from frame one, that way lies drift and panic. Instead, draw the storytelling poses first, the key frames, spaced out across the scene. A jump might be three keys: crouch, top of the arc, landing. On each of these drawings, set the frame role to key so the timeline marks it as a pillar. Get those looking right and the whole shot is already readable before a single inbetween exists.

6Push the extremes

An extreme is a key pushed to its furthest reach, the deepest crouch, the widest stretch, the frame where a pose is at its absolute limit. Draw these and tag their frame role extreme so you know they are the outer edges of the motion. Extremes are where you exaggerate, a little more than feels comfortable usually reads better once it is moving. They give your inbetweens a clear target to travel toward.

7Find the breakdowns

Between two keys, one drawing decides the whole flavour of the move: the breakdown. It is not just the halfway pose, it is where you choose whether a limb leads or drags, whether the path arcs high or low. Draw that transitional drawing and set its frame role to breakdown. A good breakdown is the difference between a stiff robot and a arm that swings with life, so spend real care here.

8Fill the inbetweens

Now the humble in-between drawings, the frames that carry the eye smoothly from one pose to the next. Draw them and tag their frame role tween so the strip shows them as the connective tissue they are. Space them tight where the motion is slow and wide where it is fast, this spacing is your timing, and it is entirely in your hands here since nothing interpolates for you. Keep them on the arc the breakdown set, straight-line inbetweens feel mechanical.

9Turn on onion skin

You cannot draw the next frame well without seeing the last one. Click the Onion eye and the frames around the playhead appear as faint ghosts under your current drawing. Past frames ghost in red, and the forward stepper +N shows future frames ahead of you as green ghosts, so you can sandwich a new inbetween exactly between the drawing before and the drawing after. Bump the forward count up when you want to see further along the arc.

10Hold on ones or twos

Most traditional animation is not a new drawing every single frame, that is animating on ones, and it is smooth but expensive. Holding each drawing for two frames is on twos, and it is the classic look that carries most character work. Set the per-frame Hold field to control how long a drawing lingers, the readout tells you plainly whether you are on ones or on twos. For a scene-wide feel, the stepped playback toggle On 1s, On 2s, or On 3s holds every drawing for that many frames during playback.

11Play it back and loop

Drawings only become animation when they move, so watch it constantly. Hit Play to run the scene and Stop to pause, and turn on Loop to run a cycle over and over while you judge the timing. To inspect a single beat, step with Previous keyframe and Next keyframe to hop between your marked frames instead of scrubbing one frame at a time. If a move feels wrong, it almost always shows on the third or fourth loop.

12Buy room with Insert frames and Markers

Timing rarely survives first contact, so you will need to add room mid-scene. Use Insert frames, tell it how many Frames to insert, and hit Insert, everything after the playhead shifts later to make space for the drawings you want to add. To keep your bearings, drop a Marker at the playhead on important beats, then hop between them with Jump to previous marker and Jump to next marker. Markers do not print or play, they are just your own signposts.

13Mix hand-drawn with a rigged character

You do not have to choose one style for a whole scene. Keep your Art row for the hand-drawn passage, then click the Character add-row button to drop a reusable rigged character in as a live instance beside it. Now a posed puppet and your frame-by-frame drawings share one stage and one timeline, playing together layered by row order. Draw a splash of hand-animated water in front of a rigged character walking through it, or a rigged body with a wildly hand-drawn face.

14What good looks like

A finished frame-by-frame scene reads clearly at speed: keys land where the story wants them, breakdowns give each move a personality, and spacing carries real weight. Loop it with onion skin off and check that nothing pops, jitters, or drifts off its arc. When it plays clean, publish it, the animation plays inline for readers and can become a Short. The in-engine frame and GIF exporter exists too, but Publish is the finish that readers actually see.

Frame-by-frame questions