Symbols

Animate with Frame Markers

Frame markers, symbols and keyframes can be used to quickly switch between different variations of parts of your animation.

Let's look at how this can help us to speed up a lip-syncing workflow. Our scene contains an audio layer with the spoken sentences to which we want to sync the mouth of a character.

Creating a Mouth Symbol#

We create a symbol which will hold all of the different mouth shapes that are needed for lip-syncing. Each mouth shape lives in a separate drawing.

We then add frame markers to each one of the frames with the drawings and use the marker comments to highlight which sounds / letters each mouth shape corresponds to.

Adding Time Keyframes using Markers#

We can now return to our main scene in which we have placed the mouth symbol on our character's face.

When you add frame markers to an animation clip that is used as a symbol, you get the option to edit the time property of the symbol layer by selecting from the list of frame markers instead of having to use a slider or having to manually input the frame numbers by hand.

Whenever we select a marker from this grid, a new keyframe is added to the time property on the current frame. This means that we can now just scrub through our timeline while listening to the sounds of the audio layer at each frame and then simply pick the corresponding mouth shape for each moment from the inspector.

Frame Marker Ranges#

When you select a marker that only spans a single frame, the new time keyframe will have a Hold easing curve which causes that same frame to remain visible until the next keyframe.

If you select a marker that spans a range of multiple frames, two time keyframes are inserted which will cause the entire marked range to be played.

One way to use this is shown below. We move the eyes of our character into their own separate symbol, where we then create two animations. On the first frame, we keep the eyes in their normal open state and annotate this frame with a marker. Between frames 2 and 6, we animate the eyes blinking and also annotate this range.

In our main scene we can now select the "Open" frame marker on the first frame of the eyes' symbol layer and whenever we want our character to play the blinking animation instead, we just move the play cursor to that frame and then select the "Blink" marker.