Staging and Animate Layers

Staging refers to the art of positioning your scene elements (characters, props and background) within or purposefully out of the boundary of the scene’s camera. Once staged, your scene elements are ready to be animated.

Positioning Layers

Positioning layers, also known as posing, is a key step in setting up your scene. To pose your scene elements, you can use the Transform tool. This will allow you to translate, rotate, scale and transform your scene elements so that they can be staged and prepared for animation.

Repositioning the Pivot

Transformations made on a drawing layer, such as rotation, scale, skew and flip, are made relative to the position of the drawing's pivot point. Setting the pivot point at the center of the articulation will allow the drawing layer's pieces to transform as expected.

There are two ways to reposition your pivot. You can reposition a pivot in a temporary or permanent manner.

To reposition the pivot temporarily, activate the transform tool, click and drag your pivot. This has no permanent effect. It will only temporarily change the pivot's position allowing you to make transformations at the selected frame, but the actual pivot point of your drawing layer will remain the same.

NOTE When you translate the pivot point, a gray circle will remain at the place of origin, indicating the temporary state of the adjustment.

To reposition your pivot permanently, you will need to adjust your pivot using one of the tools in the Advanced Animation toolbar. Once you have permanently adjusted the pivot, your pivot will appear in the new chosen position.

NOTE When you permanently move the pivot point of a layer that is already animated, all the transformations done on the layer on other keyframes will be recalculated according to the new pivot point's position. Therefore, your existing animation will look completely different, except at the current frame. It is recommended to always make sure your pivot point is at its ideal position before you start animating.

Animating a Layer

Once you have successfully posed your drawing layers, you can begin animating. To animate you can either create Stop-Motion Keyframes or Motion Keyframes in the Timeline.

Stop-Motion Keyframes require you to manually set your keyframes in the Timeline as you pose your elements. Motion Keyframes allow you to set automation for your animation between your set keyframes.

For more information on keyframes, see About Keyframes.