- Getting started
- What is modern rigging?
- Using the Asset Warp tool
- Editing your rig
What is modern rigging?
Modern rigging is an animation technique in which you create a structure inside a graphic to animate with classic tweening. The structure can have multiple joints and branches, much like a skeleton in a body. The bones of the rig can be straight or they can be curved, and they can stretch or shrink. Manipulating this structure—which is referred to as a rig in Animate—moves and deforms a mesh that is superimposed on the graphic. Moving the mesh makes the graphic move and deform accordingly.
The outlines of the mesh, known as the envelope, can also be modified, which lets you alter the contours of your graphic.
Modern rigging is a powerful yet intuitive way of working. Once you’ve established the internal rig for your graphics, adding animation is very much like controlling a puppet.
Characters are natural targets for modern rigging since they have limbs that can be controlled with the bones of a rig. But any graphic—even those that don’t have limbs—can be animated with modern rigging.