Motion: animations, moments and the player
How to play an animation, land on one of its moments and reshape the pose there with the mouse — and why the Rig and Motion switch matters.
Animations and the player
A project holds any number of animations; the tabs above the player switch between them. A loop — an idle, a run — ends where it began. A one-shot — a hit, a win burst — plays once and ends in the rest pose.
Rig or Motion: what a drag changes
The switch under the player decides what a drag on the canvas changes, and the line next to it says so in words. In Rig a drag reshapes the rig itself, and every animation follows, because animations are stored as offsets from the rest pose. In Motion a drag reshapes only the animation that is playing, at the moment the player stands on.
This is the one mistake worth knowing about in advance: an adjustment meant for one animation, made in Rig, shifts all of them.
Moments
The marks on the track are moments (keyframes in Spine terms): the points where the pose is set. The marks of the selected bone are bright, the rest of the animation is dimmed.
- Click a mark to jump exactly to that moment; the player pauses and switches to Motion.
- [ and ] step to the previous and the next moment.
- A drag on a moment adjusts it; a drag between two moments makes a new one there. The line under the switch tells you which of the two is about to happen.
- In a loop, changing one end changes the other, so the seam stays smooth.
What moves in this animation
In Motion a list under the player has a row for every bone and part that moves in the animation. Click a mark in a row to jump there and select its owner. The × on a row removes all motion of that bone or part from this animation — the quick answer to “the head nods, and it should not”.
What to ask the model for
Changes to a whole animation are a sentence, not a drag: “slower”, “half as strong”, “repeat it six times”, “add an event when the foot lands”, “copy idle as idle_fast”.