Animate Mode

These tools allow you to customize your animation and edit your scenes. You’ll find most of your tools in Animate mode in the Top Toolbar and the Timeline.

Timing Curves

A timing curve is a visual representation of how an animation behaves. When you have a Keyframe pair selected, you can adjust the timing curve in the Animation tab.

For example, you might have a letter that changes position from one side of the canvas to the other. By default, this animation will be on the “Natural” setting, or “Ease in and out” which means the animation will be slower at the beginning and end of the animation, but faster in the middle.

You can change the timing curve to a different one of the preset options, including:

• Speed Up → the animation will speed up in the second half of its movement
• Slow Down → the animation will slow down in the second half of its movement
• Step → the animation will snap instantly from one point to the other
• Linear → the animation speed will remain constant during its movement

You can also adjust any of these preset options to your custom specifications by clicking on the > next to the drop-down menu. This will open up a panel below where you can adjust the behavior of the animation with granular detail.

Masking

Masking allows you to contain an object, artwork, or photo within an overlying shape.

While you have two overlapping elements selected, click the Mask button. The element on the bottom will mask the one above it. This will combine the objects into a masked group, denoted by an “M” in the bottom right corner. You can reverse this action by clicking Unmask.

You can incorporate masked elements into your animation in many different ways.

Pinning

Pinning is a tool that you can use to animate faster in Linearity Move. When you want to create a new animation, you can use pinning to quickly define the start and end points of that animation.

Click the Pin button in the top left corner of the Timeline to start pinning. Your highlighted start and end pins will appear.

Adjust the two pins by clicking and dragging. These will be the anchoring start and end points of your animation.

For example, if you place the playhead between these two anchoring pins, two different animations will be created: One from the starting pin to the playhead position, and one from the playhead position to the ending pin.

Then, simply move or change any property of the element on your canvas to animate.

The advantage of using Pinning to animate is that you can define fixed object states with your start and end pins. If you change an object before, after, or within your pins, any change that you make will be interpolated from that change and the pins fixed state.

Pinning is perfect for many different use cases, including:

• Creating an animation in a specific segment of your project
• Creating a “pause” in an animation
• Creating a simple “back and forth” animation
• Animating a new object entering the canvas from one of the sides when you already have many objects on the canvas

Learning to use Pinning effectively can save you a lot of time while animating. For a more detailed look at Pinning, watch this tutorial:

Morphing

Morphing is a way to create a complex but common animation with just the click of a button. It allows you to animate one shape changing or “morphing” into another.

To do this, create two objects on your canvas. Select both of them, and make sure the “end” shape is higher than “start” shape in the Layers hierarchy. Click Morph, and watch the magic happen!

Once the animation is created, you can adjust and edit it just like any other animation.