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‌Choosing Which Parameters to Show‌‌‌

Before you start editing splines to customize or create animation, you need to choose which parameter’s splines you want to work on.

To show every parameter in every node:

— Click the Splines Editor Option menu and choose Expose All Controls. Toggle this control off again to go back to viewing what you were looking at before.

To show splines for the currently selected node:

— Click the Splines Editor Option menu and choose Show Only Selected Tool.

Essential Spline Editing

The Spline Editor is a deep and sophisticated environment for keyframe and spline editing and retiming, but the following overview will get you started using this tool for creating and refining animation.

To select one or more control points:

— Click any control point to select it.

— Command-click multiple control points to select them.

— Drag a bounding box around multiple control points to select them as a group.

To edit control points and splines:

— Click anywhere on a spline to add a control point.

— Drag one or more selected control points to reshape the spline.

— Shift-drag a control point to constrain its motion vertically or horizontally.

To edit Bézier curves:

— Select any control point to make its Bézier handles visible, and drag the Bézier handles.

— Command-drag a Bézier handle to break the angle between the left and right handles.

To delete control points:

— Select one or more control points and press the Delete or Backspace key.

Essential Spline Editing Tools and Modes

The Spline Editor toolbar at the bottom contains a mix of control point interpolation buttons, Spline loop modes, and Spline editing tools.

Control Point Interpolation

The first six buttons let you adjust the interpolation of one or more selected control points.

Control point interpolation controls

Smooth: Creates automatically adjusted Bézier curves to create smoothly interpolating animation.

Linear: Creates linear interpolation between control points.

Invert: Inverts the vertical position of non-animated LUT splines. This does not operate on animation splines.

Step In: For each keyframe, creates sudden changes in value at the next keyframe to the right. Similar to a hold keyframe in After Effects® or a static keyframe in the DaVinci Resolve Color page.

Step Out: Creates sudden changes in value at every keyframe for which there’s a change in value at the next keyframe to the right. Similar to a hold keyframe in After Effects or a static keyframe in the DaVinci Resolve Color page.

Reverse: Reverses the horizontal position of selected keyframes in time, so the keyframes are backward.

Spline Loop Modes

The next three buttons let you set up spline looping after the last control point on a parameter’s spline, enabling a limited pattern of keyframes to animate over a far longer duration. Only the control points you’ve selected are looped.

Spline Loop modes

Set Loop: Repeats the same pattern of keyframes over and over.

Set Ping Pong: Repeats a reversed set of the selected keyframes and then a duplicate set of the selected keyframes to create a more seamless pattern of animation.

Set Relative: Repeats the same pattern of selected keyframes but with the values of each repeated pattern of keyframes being incremented or decremented by the trend of all keyframes in the selection. This results in a loop of keyframes where the value either steadily increases or decreases with each subsequent loop.

Spline Editing Tools

The next five buttons provide specialized Spline editing tools.

Spline editing controls

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