We are excited to announce a major upgrade to how Roblox developers compose and craft the animations that bring characters and objects to life on the platform. Just as we did with the Terrain Editor (http://wiki.roblox.com/index.php?title=Intro_To_Terrain), we are rearchitecting Studio’s Animation Editor to utilize our new Lua Plugin Framework (Introduction of Lua Widgets) so that it feels more integrated with Studio. At the heart of this upgrade are two key enhancements:

The UI has been completely redesigned in an effort to make animation easier and more intuitive. The Animation Editor now lives in its own panel which can be moved around and docked so that it doesn’t interfere with the main viewport.

Whether you are a veteran animator, or have never even seen this part of Studio before, we think you will all be wow’ed by the changes. Just take a look:

Before:



After:



While making the sweeping changes above, we took the opportunity to address feedback we have been hearing from the community for some time. These changes include:

Common media control buttons have been added for play, pause, next key, previous key, start key and end key. Also, controls for setting animation length and current time have been moved out of drop down menus

The Scrub bar now moves when the animation is playing

Sections of the current animation track can be zoomed into, and the zoomed into track can be scrolled through

The hierarchy of joints is shown in a tree where any branch is collapsible

Joints can be manipulated with drag handles, as well as directly inputting position and rotation values

Position and rotation values can be viewed updating in real-time when the animation is playing

Familiar windows style right click and drop down menus

Keyboard controls for cut, copy, paste, undo, redo, play, pause

Bug fixes to all areas of the editor

Coming soon: scrubbing an animation will use Roblox’s run-time in-game animation system, so no discrepancies between what you create in the Animation Editor and what ends up playing in game

As always, we thrive on your feedback. Check out the latest build of Studio, try your hand with our new Animation Editor, and then come back and tell us what you think in the comments below.