Timeline

Play & animate

Menu / Timeline

Use the timeline to animate anything and playback animations.

Real-time Animation

Menu / Timeline / Animation Mode Switch / Real-time

When you’re holding an object while the recording mode is on—every movement of that object will be recorded in time; the timeline is playing along while you’re holding the object. As soon as you release the object—the timeline pauses.

Make sure that the real-time animation mode is turned on:

Keyframe Animation

Menu / Timeline / Animation Mode Switch / Keyframe

When you grab and release an object in the recording mode—the object gets a key on the timeline at the current time. The key is keeping information about position, rotation, and scale of the object at that time.

Set keys to all body parts

Use a mode called "Snapshot" so set keys to all body parts in a puppet.

Duration

You can change duration of the timeline by grabbing and moving the duration control on the far right of the timeline.

Tweens / Interpolations

You can set how an object is transitioning between given keys:

Animation Tracks

Select an object to see its animation tracks.

The blue boxes that are placed on tracks are animation clips & keys. Tracks and clips represent the time and duration of animated parameters, such as position of an object. On the left of each track, you can see an object name and a type of a track.

Most of tracks you will be working with will represent the position, rotation, and scale of an object.

When you’re recording an object in real-time, it will have a long, solid clip of an animation. Under the hood, it has a lot of keys inside that sometimes could be seen if you zoom the Timeline close enough.

How to Delete Keys

Duplication of keys

Learn more about duplication here.

Timeline screen

The screen shows you the currently active camera or a play area. It allows you to reference a scene from a certain point of view and playback animations looking on them from cameras.