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Part animation
Moving one layer on its own — a head turning, a hand waving, hair swinging — without redrawing it frame by frame. The layer is drawn once and the animation moves the drawing.
Where: the film icon on a layer row. It only plays while the film is playing.
The usual way in: draw the thing that moves on its own layer, or draw it anywhere and then lasso it and Split into a part, which lifts the selection out onto a new layer with its animation panel open.
Three numbers, each the total change over the cut. Move is in pixels; rotate in degrees; scale as a percentage. They all follow one eased curve, so the part arrives at its final position, angle and size together.
Pivot is where it rotates and scales about, as a percentage of the canvas. For a swinging arm put it at the shoulder; for hair, at the roots.
Return makes the animation go out and come back rather than ending where it went. With a count it repeats — count 2 is out-back-out-back over the cut.
A detail that will look like a bug the first time: with no count, the out-and-back runs over the first half of the cut and the part sits still for the second. Every effect on this panel — move, scale, mosaic — shares that timing, so they stay in step with each other.
Draw path — draw on the canvas, and the part follows it. The line is evened out before it is stored so the part moves at a constant speed rather than replaying how fast your pen was moving. Move and path add together, so a path can be combined with a rotation.
For anything the numbers cannot say. Scrub to a moment, set the part how you want it, Add key; scrub on, set it again, add another. The gaps are interpolated. With two or more keys the keyframes take over from the move / rotate / scale fields above, and the speed field only changes how fast they play.
A continuous side-to-side bend rather than a one-off move. Amount and speed, and it runs on real time — it keeps swaying however long the cut is.
Put the pivot at the fixed end. The sway grows from the pivot outward, so hair should pivot at the roots and a ribbon at where it is held.
Lag is what makes it hair rather than a flag. With lag at 0 every point along the part moves together; with lag at 0.2 the tip is doing what the root did a fifth of a second ago. The trail is what reads as weight.
Shape lets you draw the sway's waveform instead of using a plain sine — draw a wobbly line and the part sways in that shape. And the profile lets you place points along the part and set how much each bends, for an arm that bends at the elbow and not the wrist.
Why the sway is a wave and not a physics simulation: every frame here is a pure function of the time, so scrubbing and exporting give exactly what playback gave. A spring simulation carries state between frames and would answer differently. The lag gives the delay and the settle without the state.
The layer pixelates as the cut plays. Block is the size at its largest; From starts it already this pixelated. Start / End say where in the cut it happens and Speed how fast it gets there — see Effects over time on the Camera page, it is the same control.
Area — drag a rectangle on the canvas and only that part of the layer pixelates. Without one it is the whole layer. The rectangle moves with the layer if you move the layer.
It is applied to the layer's own pixels, not laid over the frame, so the sway and the part's movement act on the blocks. That is what makes it look like the drawing is pixelated rather than like a filter over the shot.
A broken-signal look on the layer's own lines: the ink wobbles, its colour comes apart so every edge fringes red on one side and cyan on the other, there is snow on the strokes, and now and then a frame tears sideways in bands. It flickers — most frames are a mild wobble, then one goes badly wrong.
Strength is 0 to 1 and it is a gate, not a ramp: the moment the window opens the static is at that strength. Start / End are where in the cut it is on, as 0 to 1; an end of 1 keeps it on to the end of the cut.
Colour is the chromatic fringe — the line splits, red to one side and cyan to the other, like a signal breaking up. It is a red and a cyan silhouette of the ink laid behind the line and shifted apart, so it works on black ink and on a white background, and it grows with the tearing on a bad frame.
It is applied only where the layer has ink. Empty canvas stays empty, so it works on a transparent background and in a PNG-sequence export, and the sway, the mask and the part's movement all act on the glitched drawing. It began as an effect over the whole frame and was moved here for exactly that reason: the noise should follow the lines, not shake the canvas.
The same static is available on a text: in the text editor, a strength, a colour and a start/end. A noisy text is drawn onto a canvas of its own first, so only the glyphs tear.
The wavy icon on a layer row, separate from the panel above. The strokes jitter in place, like a hand-drawn line redrawn every frame — the traditional "boil". It is a per-layer setting rather than an animation: it runs whether or not the film is playing, so you can see it while you draw.