Project setup flow
Open 2D Animation, tap New Animation, choose Square 1:1, keep 24 fps, select None as the target platform, tap Continue to Starter, then choose Walk Cycle or Talking Avatar.
2D Animation · Complete guide
Rig it, pose it, animate it.
Ten stages, in order, from an empty canvas to a rigged character with a face, a camera and a soundtrack. Stages 1–3 get something moving in about two minutes. Stages 4–7 are where the quality actually comes from. Stages 8–10 finish it and get it out of the app.
Edit canvas→Rig & pose→Animate timeline→Motion & finish
No tokens required. Rigging, posing, the timeline, motion presets and the motion prompt all run on your device and cost nothing. The only part of this tool that spends tokens is generating new artwork — a body part or a background — because that is real image generation.
Quick recipes
Reproduce the design-board flows.
Use these as direct tap-by-tap paths when you want the app screens to behave like the reference boards.
Character building flow
Start from Ready rig, open Character, add or replace body parts, use Auto Rig, then verify every gold pivot sits on the joint before saving the character.
Rig and pose flow
Open Rig & Pose, apply Auto Rig, test the shoulder, elbow, hip and knee chains, fix pivots by dragging the gold dots, then save the pose from the pose library.
Timeline motion flow
Open Animate, keep Simple mode for a first pass, choose a motion preset, turn on Loop, then switch to advanced rows only when you need to retime individual position, rotation, scale or opacity keys.
AI motion flow
Open AI, choose Create motion, type a plain-language movement such as wave with the right hand, set the length, enable repeat when needed, then tap Create editable motion.
Scene, audio and export flow
Open Scene to add shots and camera moves, use Audio for music, SFX, voiceover and captions, then open Export, pick the delivery preset and render the final result.
Tip from the app. The in-app guide card opens this exact section, so users can leave the editor, follow the web steps, and return with the same project still autosaved.
Stage 1
Start a project
Everything downstream — canvas size, frame rate, how much of the interface you see — is decided in the two setup steps before the editor opens.
Stage 2
Learn the canvas
Six things to recognise.
Stage 3
Your first animation, pose to pose
This is the whole craft in five steps: a body with joints, two different poses, and the editor drawing every frame in between.
Stage 4
Rig it properly
Stage 3 gets movement.
Stage 5
Work the timeline
Presets get you a first draft.
Stage 6
Presets and the motion prompt
Two ways to get keyframes without placing them yourself.
Stage 7
Face, blinks and lip sync
A face reads before a body does.
Stage 8
Scenes, camera and background
One animated character is a clip.
Stage 9
Audio, captions and timing
Timing to sound is the fastest route to something that feels produced rather than assembled.
Stage 10
Export, versions and handoff
Set the delivery format, keep restore points, and get the result out of the app.
Stage 1 · Basics
Start a project
Everything downstream — canvas size, frame rate, how much of the interface you see — is decided in the two setup steps before the editor opens.
Open the tool
Tools → 2D Animation. The projects screen lists everything you have made, with the newest first. New project starts the two-step setup.
Pick the canvas
Portrait 9:16, Landscape 16:9, Square 1:1, Classic 4:5, or type your own width and height. Choosing landscape switches the safe-area guide to YouTube; square suggests the sticker frame.
Set frame rate and length
12, 15, 24, 30 or 60 fps, plus a duration in seconds. 24 is the default and the right answer for almost everything — 12 gives a deliberate, snappy, hand-drawn feel.
Choose how much you want to see
Simple shows presets and a collapsed timeline. Creator adds rigging and layered tracks. Pro shows every control. This is a display preference, not a paywall, and it changes any time.
Pick a starter
Ready rig, Talking avatar, Walk cycle, Explainer, Sticker pack, Story scene or Blank canvas. Every starter costs zero tokens.
Why the starter matters. Anything other than Blank builds a fifteen-part body with joints already parented and drops an editable motion loop on the timeline. You open the editor with something already moving, and every part of it is yours to change.
Stage 2 · Basics
Learn the canvas
Six things to recognise. Learn these and the rest of the editor stops being a mystery.
The seven tools
Down the left edge: Select, Move, Rotate, Reshape, Rig, Animate, Face. Select touches nothing — use it to pick a part without nudging it.
The gold dot is the joint
Every part rotates and scales around its pivot, drawn as a gold dot. In Move mode, dragging the part body moves the part; dragging the gold dot moves the joint. That distinction is most of 2D rigging.
The cyan corner resizes
Switch to Reshape and drag the cyan corner handle to change a part's width and height. Position and rotation stay where they were.
The layer list
Every part is a layer. The eye icon hides one, the lock icon freezes it, tapping selects it. Layer hierarchy opens parenting, reordering and grouping.
The five studio tabs
Along the bottom: Character, Animate, Scene, Audio, AI. Each opens a full panel over the canvas rather than a cramped popover.
The coach card
A card in the corner names the single next thing worth doing, counting through four steps. Why? explains the reasoning behind the step; the X dismisses it.
Stage 3 · Basics
Your first animation, pose to pose
This is the whole craft in five steps: a body with joints, two different poses, and the editor drawing every frame in between.
Get a body with joints
Character tab → Ready rig. Fifteen editable parts, already parented into arms, legs, torso and head.
Turn on Auto Key
Animate tab → Auto Key. With it on, any property you change becomes a keyframe at the playhead. With it off, you are only moving things around.
Create pose A and pose B
The coach card's Create both poses saves the entire rig at the playhead, then again 0.6 seconds later. You now have two identical poses — and identical poses produce no motion, which is the point of the next step.
Make pose B different
Move the playhead to the second pose, select a shoulder or a forearm, switch to Rotate, and drag sideways. Children follow their parent, so rotating an upper arm carries the forearm and hand with it.
Play it
Every frame between the two poses is interpolated. Watch that each joint bends from its gold pivot — if something swings from the wrong place, the pivot is wrong, not the pose.
If the character moves as one solid block. It is still a single part. A flat image is one rectangle no matter how good the drawing is. Build the ready rig, or split the artwork into separate torso, arm, forearm and hand layers.
Stage 4 · Rigging
Rig it properly
Stage 3 gets movement. Stage 4 is where movement starts looking like an actual body. Almost all of the difference is pivot placement.
Auto rig first
Character tab → Auto rig character. It reads part names and types, assigns parents, and places a pivot on every body part it recognises. It tells you how many settings it changed.
Then fix the pivots by hand
This is the single biggest quality lever in 2D animation. A shoulder pivot sitting at the shoulder reads as an arm. The same pivot in the middle of the arm reads as a propeller. Move mode, drag the gold dot.
Check the chain
Hips → thigh → shin → foot. Torso → upper arm → forearm → hand. Rotate the parent and the whole chain should swing. If it doesn't, open Edit skeleton and re-parent.
Mirror instead of rebuilding
Select a finished arm or leg and use Mirror selected part. You get the opposite side duplicated and flipped across the parent, ready to reposition.
Set the rig's constraints
IK arms, IK legs, hand target, foot lock, look-at and joint limits are per-character rig settings, saved with the project and carried through export.
Add a face while you are here
Face Studio attaches Eye L, Eye R, Eyebrow L, Eyebrow R and Mouth to the head as real, independently animatable layers.
How posing works today. Posing is forward kinematics: you rotate a parent and the chain follows it. The IK and joint-limit switches are saved on the character's rig and travel with the project; they describe how the rig should behave rather than solving a chain backward from the hand to the shoulder while you drag.
Stage 5 · Rigging
Work the timeline
Presets get you a first draft. Everything after the first draft happens on the timeline, one key at a time.
Three timeline modes
Simple keeps the character collapsed to one row. Advanced exposes every part and property. Frame by frame steps a frame at a time for tight timing work.
Four tracks per part
Position, Rotation, Scale and Opacity, each in its own colour. Select a part to reveal its tracks — that is why the timeline looks empty with nothing selected.
Add, move, copy, delete
Keys drop at the playhead. Drag one to retime it, duplicate it to repeat a beat, delete it to flatten a section. Keys at the same moment are grouped so you can move a whole pose at once.
Easing is per key
Linear, ease-in, ease-out, ease-in-out, bounce, spring, elastic and step. Easing governs the segment ending at that key. Ease-in-out on a limb is the line between animation and a slideshow.
Loop, reverse, repeat a range
Loop the active clip, reverse every key in it, or take the keys between two times and copy them to the end of the timeline.
Zoom in before fine work
The timeline zoom control makes 1/24th of a second a target you can actually hit with a finger.
Stage 6 · Motion
Presets and the motion prompt
Two ways to get keyframes without placing them yourself. Both produce ordinary, editable keys — never a sealed clip.
Motion presets
Animate tab: Idle, Walk, Run, Jump, Wave, Nod, Dance, Blink. Each writes a cycle onto the timeline and tells you how many keys it added and across how many parts.
Pose chips
Stand, Sit, Wave, Point, Think, Happy, Run, Jump, Hero and Dance apply a pose at the playhead as a starting point to push further.
The motion prompt
AI tab → Create motion. Describe the movement in plain language — “make the right leg kick and repeat it”. Your wording is matched to a motion recipe, and the keys land at the playhead.
Repeat to end
Copies the cycle across the rest of the clip and keeps playback looping. This is how a 1.2-second walk becomes a five-second walk.
Generate part
The AI panel's second mode generates new artwork for a single body part and attaches it to the rig at the right parent. That one is real image generation and spends tokens; motion does not.
Then edit what it made
Retime it, restage it, change the easing, delete the keys you don't want. Generated motion is a draft, and it is meant to be.
Motion costs nothing and runs on your phone. It is deterministic on purpose: the same words produce the same keys, offline, with no waiting and no tokens. You get keyframes you can inspect and change instead of an opaque rendered clip you can only accept or discard.
Stage 7 · Motion
Face, blinks and lip sync
A face reads before a body does. Three small additions carry a surprising amount of performance.
Build the face
Character tab → Face Studio. Two eyes, two brows and a mouth are attached to the head, sized and positioned to it, each one a normal layer.
Animate it like any other part
Eyes and brows have Position, Rotation, Scale and Opacity tracks like everything else. A brow raised two degrees at the right moment does more than a whole body pose.
Blink
The Blink preset writes an eye-scale loop. Combine it with Idle breathing and a still character stops looking dead.
Lip sync
Audio tab → AI lip sync writes a run of mouth-shape keys forward from the playhead, up to three seconds, and builds a mouth first if the character has none. It produces a believable talking mouth rather than a phoneme-accurate analysis of your audio file — and every key it writes stays editable.
Stage 8 · Finishing
Scenes, camera and background
One animated character is a clip. Scenes, a camera and a background are what turn it into a shot.
Scenes
Add, duplicate, switch and delete. Each scene keeps its own characters, background, animation, camera and audio, so a second scene never disturbs the first.
Transitions
Cut, fade, slide, zoom, wipe, flash and blur, with an adjustable duration between scenes.
Camera
Static, zoom in, zoom out, pan left, pan right, follow, shake and handheld, plus TikTok, Reels, YouTube and sticker safe-area guides so nothing important sits under a caption.
Background Studio
A solid colour, an imported image or generated art, with drift, zoom or float motion and cover or contain fit. Procedural motion keeps a still background alive without adding keyframe noise.
Parallax layers
Depth layers move at different speeds when the camera pans, with per-layer depth, opacity, blur and visibility.
Props and effects
Attach a prop to a body part or to the canvas. Sparkles, rain, snow, smoke, fire, magic, speed lines and glow start at the playhead and behave like timeline layers.
Stage 9 · Finishing
Audio, captions and timing
Timing to sound is the fastest route to something that feels produced rather than assembled.
Three kinds of audio track
Voiceover, Music and SFX, each with its own volume, mute and fade in / fade out.
Beat markers
Detect beats lays down markers across the scene to time poses against. Landing a pose on a marker is what makes motion look intentional.
Captions and dialogue
Caption, subtitle, speech bubble and title, each timed, styled and editable, and able to follow a body part.
Audio-reactive background
The canvas background can shift with the volume of the audio track.
Stage 10 · Finishing
Export, versions and handoff
Set the delivery format, keep restore points, and get the result out of the app.
Choose the format
MP4, GIF, WEBM, PNG sequence, sprite sheet, alpha WEBM, Lottie, or an editable project package. Sprite sheets and alpha formats are the ones game and motion pipelines ask for.
Choose the frame and the range
TikTok, Reels, YouTube, square or sticker presets; draft, high or best quality; this scene, all scenes, or the character on its own. Transparent background is available for PNG sequences and alpha-capable formats.
Render
The render button captures the current canvas frame as a lossless PNG and hands it to the system share sheet. Multi-frame video export keeps every setting above and reports renderer availability clearly rather than failing quietly.
Keep restore points
Save checkpoint writes a labelled version into project history, so an experiment never costs you a good take.
It saves itself
Every change is written to the project as you make it. The header shows the autosave state — there is no save button to forget.
Reference
What the motion prompt understands.
Type any of these words and you get that cycle. Anything unrecognised falls through to a walk, so it is worth knowing the list.
| Motion | Words that trigger it | What it writes |
|---|---|---|
| Walk cycle | walk, step | Alternating thigh and shin swing with a torso bob |
| Run cycle | run, sprint | A faster, wider-amplitude version of the walk |
| Wave | wave, hello, greet, hand | Upper arm lifts, forearm swings side to side |
| Kick | kick, football, soccer | Thigh drives forward, shin snaps out |
| Bounce | bounce, jump, hop, up and down | Whole-body vertical travel with a squash at the bottom |
| Breathing loop | breath, idle, alive, chest | Subtle torso scale — the one to add to any still character |
| Head nod | nod, look down, head bob | Head rotation around the neck |
| Blink loop | blink, close eyes | Eye scale collapse and recover |
| Talking motion | talk, speak, phoneme, lip sync | Mouth shapes with a light head accent |
| Dance loop | dance, groove | Combined hip, torso and arm cycle |
| Pose | stand, sit, point, think, happy, hero, fight | A single held pose rather than a cycle |
Troubleshooting
Six things that go wrong, and why.
The character moves as one solid block.
It is still a single part — a flat image is one rectangle however well it is drawn. Build the ready rig, or split the artwork into separate torso, arm, forearm and hand layers.
An arm swings from the wrong place.
The pivot is in the wrong spot. Switch to Move, find the gold dot on that part, and drag it onto the actual joint. Pivot placement fixes more bad animation than any other single change.
Nothing happens when I drag the playhead.
Either Auto Key is off, or both of your poses are identical. Turn Auto Key on, go to the second pose, and change something.
The motion prompt gave me a walk when I asked for something else.
No recognised word matched, and walk is the fallback. Check the vocabulary table above and use one of those words, or apply a preset and edit its keys.
The timeline only shows four rows.
Those are the four transform tracks of the selected part. Select a different part to see its tracks, or switch the timeline to Advanced to expose every part at once.
A generated body part attached to the wrong place.
Open the layer hierarchy and re-parent it, then drag its gold pivot onto the joint it should rotate around.
Now go make something move.
The fastest path from here: open 2D Animation, pick the Ready rig starter, and work stages 3 and 4 on the character that is already on your canvas.