With Smart Animate, there’s a new feature that emphasizes each instance of an element on different artboards. To borrow the words of Nikolas Klein of Figma, “It highlights all objects in other frames that will match up in case of a Smart Animate transition.”

The highlighting feature comes in handy when you have multiple elements linked by Smart Animate

I used this feature to understand what’s really going on and why the boolean shape wasn’t being animated properly.

Testing which elements are linked by Smart Animate

You can see that the icon tiles (rounded rectangles) are linked, but the boolean shapes aren’t. Instead of two instances of one element, they’re treated as two different objects.

But it works great with simple shapes.

So to work with Smart Animate, I had to sacrifice background gradient-fill and use simple shapes with solid fills instead. In the example below, size, color, and position of different shapes were modified between animation states.

All simple homogenous shapes are detected and connected as Smart Animate elements.

FINAL RESULT