Quick Start

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Getting Started

Note: The key you might have gotten is a Steam key and you can activate it like this: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=5414-tfbn-1352

This post is meant to get you up and running with AnimVR. We will cover:

• Button Mappings
• Menus
• File Storage + Saving/Loading

Button Mappings

Primary Hand (Blue)

1. Application Button Short Press to Undo, Press and Hold to select a line and delete it.
2. Touchpad Click to open the Paint Menu, Swipe to change brush size.
3. Trigger Paint
4. Grip Press and Hold to pick a color from the scene.
5. Grip + Grip (Secondary Hand) Transform.

Secondary Hand (Orange)

1. Application Button Open Animation Menu (Add/Remove Timelines and Frames, etc.)
2. Touchpad Click middle to start playback, click left/right to change frames manually
3. Trigger Add New Frame
4. Grip One Hand Grab transform (no scaling)
5. Grip + Grip (Primary Hand) Transform.

Menus

Animation Menu

The Animation Menu lets you brows through the various parts of the currently loaded stage. With the Animation Menu you also open the Transform Menu which is explained below.

Layer

In this menu you can add, clone and delete layers. You can switch between layer (the currently selected one will blink) and offset the frame index of the currently selected timelines relative to all the others. On the bottom are visibility controls. The slider changes the opacity of the current layer and the eye icon hides it. The button on the right lets you import meshes from your <Documents>/ANIMVR/Models. Each imported mesh is a new layer.

Frame

In the frame menu you can insert new frames as well as delete existing ones. The button on the top right clones the current frame while the button on the bottom right adds a "hold" frame. The difference between cloning and holding a frame is that any changes made to held frames will affect all other frames in the hold sequence while cloning a frame makes an independent copy.

Transform Menu

The transform menu opens above your secondary hand when you open the Animation Menu. Here you can choose which object you want to transform.

1. The current stage, which is basically everything you have drawn.
2. The current symbol (currently not in use, behaves like stage)
3. The current timeline
4. The current frame

Frame transformations are stored in the animation and played back. One possible use would be cloning frames and transforming each cloned frame individually to get a kind of stop motion effect.

You can also reset the scale of the transform of the stage by pressing the coordinate system on the left. This is useful if you want to export your stage and want to make sure that it matches your scene in Maya/Blender.

Paint Menu

You open the paint menu by pressing the touchpad on your primary controller (the one you paint with).

Brush Settings

The left hand site shows various brush options. We recommend playing with them and figuring out what you like! On the right hand site you see the color picker, here you can change the current brush color, both for painting new lines as well as coloring old ones. Clicking the cube above the color picker sets the background color.

AnimBrush Menu

We call the action you do when you paint during playback (that works, try it!) AnimBrush. In this menu you can set how long the stroke gets.

Onion Skin Settings

The slider control the opacity of the onion skin previous/next frames. You can disable onion skins alltogether with the button in the middle.

Save/Load/Record

The three buttons at the top are New Stage, Save and Load. Below those on the left is "Save As".
The button in the bottom middle starts "recording mode" in which you can record your animation with a handheld camera. The button on the right exports the current stage to an Alembic Cache file.
Finally, the little button in the bottom right re-downloads all the demo scenes in case you deleted them.

Share

In this menu you can share your creations on Twitter (as gifs) and Sketchfab (as full 3D animations). You need to click register and follow the usual app authentication process in your browser.

File Storage + Saving/Loading

All files you save and export or gifs you record are stored in <Documents>/ANIMVR. "Stages" are the animations you create. You can share these with other people, any stage you put into the "Stages" folder will be available from the Load File menu.