Keyframes, dope sheet & curves

A pose becomes animation when you record it as a keyframe at a point in time. The Character tool's bottom panel is where you do that: a transport bar plus a tab strip that switches between the dope sheet (timing) and the curve editor (easing). Onion-skin ghosts help you see the motion around the playhead. This article assumes you can already pose the rig.

Auto-key vs explicit keying#

The transport has an Auto-key toggle that controls what happens when you pose a bone:

• Auto-key on — posing a bone (gizmo, IK drag, or a rotation field) records a key at the playhead automatically. This is the editor's default behavior.
• Auto-key off — posing is a free preview; nothing is recorded until you key explicitly.

Either way, you can always key by hand:

• K — key the selected bone at the playhead
• Shift+K — key all bones at the playhead

Turning auto-key off is useful for exploring a pose before committing it, or for keying an entire pose at once with Shift+K rather than bone-by-bone.

Transport and clip settings#

The transport bar drives playback and clip parameters:

• Play / pause — Space, or the play button
• Stop — returns the playhead to the clip start
• Loop and a speed multiplier
• Duration (seconds) and FPS inputs for the current clip
• A time readout in seconds and frames

Frame stepping and jumps: , and . step one frame back/forward (and pause playback), Home and End jump to the clip start and end.

The dope sheet#

The dope sheet is the timing view: one row per bone that has keys, grouped into collapsible Hips / Spine / Arms / Legs / Fingers sections, each with a summary row, plus an All row across the top. It is designed to stay responsive even when many bones are keyed.

Keys are diamonds. The core gestures:

• Drag the ruler — scrub the playhead
• Click a row header — select that bone (group headers fold/unfold instead)
• Click a key — select it; drag — move the selected keys together, snapped to frames (hold Shift to disable snapping)
• Shift+click a key — add or remove it from the multi-selection
• Drag on empty cells — marquee-select keys across rows and times (Shift adds)
• Double-click an empty cell — insert a key from the current pose at that bone and time
• Drag a selection edge bar — retime: scale the selected keys' times proportionally

Every gesture is one undo step. When you select multiple bones' keys on a summary or All row, clicking a summary key fans out to every underlying key at that time.

Clipboard operations work on the current key selection:

• Mod+C — copy, Mod+V — paste at the playhead (same bones), Mod+X — cut
• Shift+Mod+V — paste mirrored (left↔right bones, with the rotation mirrored)
• Mod+A — select every key in the clip
• Delete / Backspace — delete the selection; Esc — clear it

Mirrored paste is the fast way to build a symmetric walk or gesture: key one side, copy, and paste mirrored on the offset frames.

The curve editor#

Switch to the curve editor tab to shape how a value moves between keys. It plots the selected bone's rotation as XYZ curves, plus Hips position XYZ, using the same interpolation as playback so what you see is what plays. Legend chips toggle individual channels (RX/RY/RZ, PX/PY/PZ) on and off.

Click a key dot to select it, then set its easing from the curve toolbar. The options are:

• Linear (the default) and Step (hold the value until the next key)
• Ease-in, Ease-out, and Ease-in-out
• Custom cubic Bezier — drag the two yellow handles to shape the segment's easing by hand

Easing changes the motion between one key and the next without changing the values at either key. On export, non-linear easing is baked into sampled keys, so exported files play the same in engines that do not read Studio easing metadata.

Onion-skin ghosts#

Onion skinning draws faint ghost skeletons at frame offsets around the playhead — blue for past frames, orange for future — so you can see the arc of a motion while you pose. Toggle it with O (or the onion button), and set how many frames show on each side (1–5, default 2). The ghosts follow every scrub and key edit and hide automatically during playback.

Where to go next#

• Clips, sequences & layers — manage multiple clips and blend them.
• Exporting animations — write clip JSON and GLB.