Timeline toolbar
Every control in the Timeline header, left to right: what it does, what it defaults to, and when it is greyed out.
The Timeline header holds thirteen controls in a fixed order. Several are split buttons: the main half does the obvious thing, and the small caret beside it opens a popup of options for it. When the panel is too narrow for all of them, the ones that do not fit move into a menu at the end of the header, and buttons that share a job travel together: the four exposure steps, the cell buttons and the track toggles each move as a set rather than being split across the two places.
The header is only drawn in Animate mode, like the rest of the panel.
Layer buttons
The first group of three adds, duplicates and deletes a layer. Add opens a small icon menu offering Bone, Group, Mesh, Pixel, Raster, Symbol and Vector; each creates the layer in a single undo step, and Raster may first ask you for its dimensions. Duplicate copies the selected layer and appends Copy to its name. Delete removes it.
Duplicate and Delete are disabled when no layer is selected.
Auto Key
Auto Key is a split button. The main half arms automatic keyframing and turns red while it is on; it is off in a new project. The caret opens the Auto-Key Channels popup, which decides which properties an edit is allowed to key.
The popup is a four-column grid, one column per family, with a heading and a rule over each. Twenty-nine channels are listed: every keyframable sub-track the app has, including the layer-effect parameter tracks and the bone channels, which the old flat list could not reach.
| Group | Channels | Armed by default |
|---|---|---|
| Transform | Position, Rotation, Rotation X, Rotation Y, Scale, Anchor, Follow Path | All but Anchor |
| Shape | Vertices, Fill, Stroke, Expose, Dash, Mesh | Mesh only |
| Appearance | Opacity, Blend, Layer Effects | None |
| Camera | Camera Depth, Zoom, Point of Interest, Depth of Field | All |
| Layer | Switch, Z-Order | All |
| Bone | Angle, Stretch, Position, Inverse Kinematics, Angle Dynamics, Position Dynamics, Scale Dynamics | All |
Nine channels start off: Vertices, Fill, Stroke, Expose, Dash, Anchor, Opacity, Blend and Layer Effects. Everything else is armed, so a rig keys the way you expect while the channels that would fill the Timeline with noise stay quiet until you ask for them.
Three icon buttons in the popup title row act on the whole grid: All ticks every channel, None clears them, and Invert flips each one.
Keyframe navigation and Add Keyframe
Previous Keyframe and Next Keyframe jump the playhead to the nearest keyframe before or after the current frame. They read every channel a layer can carry, not just the obvious ones: transform and bone keys, but also per-parameter Fill, Stroke and Width style tracks, Follow Path and other layer parameters, Layer Effects parameters, per-bone parameters such as wind sensitivity and dynamics, mesh deform keys, and the frame a raster cell changes on. If a diamond is drawn on the row, these buttons will find it.
The scope follows the selection when the selection has keyframes in it, and falls back to the whole scene when it does not. So with nothing selected, or with a layer selected that carries no keys at all, the buttons still walk the animation instead of doing nothing.
Between them sits Add Keyframe, the diamond. Its main half writes keyframes at the current frame for every selected layer in one undo step, using its own channel popup: a separate set of ticks from the Auto Key one, with the same All / None / Invert actions. On a bone layer it keys the selected bone instead of the layer. It does nothing on frame 0.
View and keying toggles
The next group of four is a row of small toggles.
| Toggle | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Show / Hide Camera Track | Shown | Shows or hides the camera layer's row |
| Show / Hide Sub-tracks | On | Lists only the sub-tracks that already own keyframes; off lists every channel the layer supports |
| Relative Keyframing | Off | An edit shifts every existing keyframe on that channel instead of writing a new one |
| Auto-Freeze Keyframe | Off | Inserts a holding keyframe one frame earlier before writing a new one |
Show Sub-tracks filters every animatable row, a bone's Angle, Stretch and Position rows and the bone group itself included, along with Switch and Variant, Z-Order and Depth of Field. Structural rows stay put whatever it is set to: the layer's own row, the cell strip, Symbol Playback and the group markers. See Sub-tracks.
The first two are remembered between sessions. Relative Keyframing and Auto-Freeze are covered in detail on the Keying modes page; both are ignored while you are editing an Action.
Onion Skin
Another split button. The main half turns onion skinning on and off; if there are no offsets set when you enable it, it fills in one to five frames either side for you, up to a maximum of ten active offsets.
The caret opens the settings: Enable Onion Skin, a count of active offsets with a Clear button, an Opacity slider from 10% to 100% (50% by default), a Position combo of Back or Front (Back by default), and the two colour swatches Before and After that tint earlier and later frames.
Easing and Interval
The Easing combo sets the interpolation of the selected keyframes, from the nine presets listed on the Easing page. Beside it, the Interval combo holds those keyframes on twos, threes and up to eights.
Both are disabled unless a keyframe is explicitly selected. Clicking a keyframe first is the whole trick: neither combo falls back to whatever sits under the playhead.
What they affect depends on what you selected. A keyframe on a sub-track row changes that channel only; a diamond on the main layer row fans the change out to every channel keyed at that frame.
Motion Blur
This toggle switches motion blur on for the whole scene; it is off by default. A layer also needs its own motion-blur dot lit in the label column before it is blurred. The toggle is not part of the undo history.
Cell operations
When the selected layer is a Raster or Vector layer, a group of three cell buttons appears: Add Cell, Duplicate Cell and Remove Cell. Add punches a new drawing in at the current frame, or at the next frame if this one already holds a keyed cell. Duplicate copies the visible drawing to the following frame as an independent cell. Remove clears the cell here.
Duplicate and Remove are disabled when no cell is visible on the current frame. Adding a cell moves the playhead to it and leaves Edit mode.
Extend exposure
The strip marked +1, +2, +3 and +4 pushes everything after the current pose or cell later by that many frames, for every selected layer. It ripples keyframes, bone keys, parameter tracks, blank-frame markers and cell exposures together, and grows the project length if it needs to. It is disabled when nothing is selected.
Zoom
The last two buttons, pinned to the right end of the header, zoom the frame grid horizontally between 0.4x and 5x. Each click steps by 0.1, or by 0.5 with Ctrl held.