Accord Suite has two animation pages. Anime Core — "layers, the timeline, curves and effect controls, for making things move" — is for 2D: motion graphics, cut-out characters, hand-drawn frames and compositing. Motion Core — "layers, the scene, its properties and its keys, for 3D" — is for scenes with depth, lights and cameras.
Anime Core in sixteen seconds.
This guide starts with the principle underneath both — the keyframe — and works up to rigs, particles, compositing and 3D.
Keyframes: the idea everything rests on
A keyframe (a "key") is a value at a moment: this title is off-screen at 0:00 and centred at 0:01. The computer works out every frame in between. In Accord Suite:
- Select a layer, put the playhead on a moment, and in Effect Controls click the stopwatch beside a property: it is keyed there.
- Move the playhead and change the value: a second key, and the property now moves between them.
- Choose Hold (jump at the next key) or Straight (move evenly) for how a key moves on, or click the stopwatch again to stop the property moving.
Almost every number in the app has a stopwatch — position, scale, rotation and opacity, but also an effect's blur, a Levels point, a Colour Balance slider, a Channel Mixer weight or an HSL band.
The graph editor: where animation starts to feel alive
Even timing looks mechanical. Real things ease — they speed up out of rest and slow into it. The Curve panel (the graph editor) draws each property as a line over time, and its shape is the motion:
- Handles. Each key has Bézier handles that bend the curve. Choose Free to leave each handle where you drag it, Aligned to keep a key's two handles in line (no kink), or Auto-Clamped to work them out from the keys so the curve never overshoots. Flatten levels the handles (an ease that comes to a full stop); Equalise makes them a third of their span.
- Curve modifiers. Under Curve ▸ Add: Wobble shakes a value, Cycle repeats a move, Stepped makes it jump in steps (the "on twos" look of hand animation), with more under More — Climbing Cycle, There and Back, Polynomial, Function, Envelope and Limits. They stay live; Bake into Keyframes writes the result out as keys.
- Picking keys. Box, Lasso or Circle select keys by shape; Select Keys picks a whole column — every key at the playhead, between markers, or before or after it — so a pose can be moved across every property at once.
- Kinds of key. Animators plan poses as keys, breakdowns, extremes and moving holds. Kind ▸ Call the Selected Keys labels them, so the plan reads at a glance in the Sheet.
- Mute a curve to stop it driving its property without losing its keys; protect it (the lock) so its keys cannot be changed by accident.
Follow-through. Two of the twelve classic principles of animation are follow-through and overlapping action: things lag, overshoot and settle. Select a layer whose position, turn or size is keyed and turn on Follow-Through in the Properties panel; it plays those keys through a spring, set by Frequency, Bounce and Squash. A title that lands and wobbles into place, without a single extra key.
Reusing motion: phrases and drivers
Phrases. Key a layer, then choose Animate ▸ Make a Phrase from the Keys. The motion becomes a bar in the Sheet panel that you can move in time, mix, mute, duplicate and fade. Two phrases with a gap can be bridged with Blend Between Phrases; overlapping phrases can be grouped and moved as one. Animators coming from 3D packages will know this as non-linear animation.
Drivers. Some numbers should follow others — a wheel that turns as the car moves. Control-click a number's stopwatch and choose Drive This from Another Value…; pick a layer and one of its values (or Time in Seconds), then Multiply by and Then add. Change the car's position and the wheel takes care of itself.
Hand-drawn animation
Frame by frame. Layer ▸ New Drawing Layer, paint, then New Drawing in the bar under the picture starts a fresh drawing at the current frame; each drawing holds until the next begins. In the Sheet, drag a drawing's mark to retime it.
Timing charts. Hand animators decide where each inbetween falls between two key drawings — bunched together where the move is slow. On a drawing layer, put the playhead on a key drawing with another after it and choose Timing Chart ▸ On Ones, On Twos or On Threes (a new drawing every frame, every second frame, every third). Drag a tick nearer one key or the other, or choose a spacing; Interpolate makes the inbetweens in one step.
Stroke tools. Remove Specks clears the tiny strokes a pen leaves behind. Stroke modifiers — Build, Length, Array, Dash, Simplify, Colourise, Rim, Shadow and Swirl — change how strokes draw over time without redrawing them; Build is how a line "draws itself on". The brush can lay ink in dashes, stitches or dots.
Rigs: making a character move without redrawing it
IK chains. Select an upper arm, then the forearm, and choose Layer ▸ Rig ▸ Make IK Chain. Move the target — or key it — and the limb bends to reach it, the elbow working out where it must go. This is inverse kinematics: you animate the hand, not every joint.
Bones on a drawing. For a character drawn on one layer, make the bones (one layer per bone, each following the one before), select the drawing, Command-click its bones and choose Layer ▸ Rig ▸ Bind Drawing to Bones. Turn a bone and the drawing bends. Where it bends is set by weights: choose a bone under Weight for and paint with the brush — Add gives the bone more of the points under the brush, Subtract less — with dots showing each point's weight.
Puppet pins. For a picture or shape never cut into parts: Layer ▸ Rig ▸ Puppet Pins, click to add pins, then drag a pin and the drawing bends around it.
Many things at once: clones and particles
Clones. Select a shape and choose Layer ▸ Clones ▸ Linear, Radial, Grid or Honeycomb. Set how many and how far apart, then Add Effector to scatter, step or move the copies. It stays live: change the original and every clone follows.
Particles. Layer ▸ Particles and a starting point — sparkles, snow, confetti, bubbles, dust or embers that move on their own. Play the timeline to see them; set how many, how long they live, how fast and how widely they go.
Compositing in the node editor
Anime Core's node editor treats the picture as a graph of operations, the way compositing software does:
- Effects on one picture. Add Effect, Add Adjustment or Add Track Matte on a node; right-click an input socket and Insert Effect Here to change one wire only.
- Keying. A Chroma Key pulls a green or blue screen. Choose the colour Space that separates the screen best (Chromaticity, RGB, HSV or YCbCr), Choke to shrink the edge, Edge Blur to soften it, Spill removal to take the screen's colour off hair and skin. Wire a mask into the Garbage Matte input to force an area out and the Core Matte input to keep an area whole.
- Masks. Box and Ellipse masks inside the graph, combined New, Add, Subtract, Intersect or Exclude; a Double-Edge Mask ramps from full inside one mask to nothing at another's edge.
- Corner pin. A Perspective layer or node keys four corners, to put a picture onto a moving phone screen or sign.
- Split Screen. One picture each side of a line — a before and after that is part of the exported picture, with the line itself keyable.
- Curves, Normalise, Kuwahara, Tone Map, Arithmetic — tone curves, stretching to full black and white, a painted look, bringing back over-bright highlights, and colour arithmetic.
- File Output. Write several pictures from the graph at once — a beauty pass, a matte, a background — as files, or as numbered sequences for every frame.
- Backdrops label part of the graph; View This Node shows the picture partway through it without rewiring anything. A node's numbers have stopwatches too, and its keys appear in the Sheet and the graph editor alongside a layer's.
Tracking: sticking things to footage
To pin a graphic to something moving in a shot, track it. The Tracker (on Colour Core) follows what you draw round:
- Pattern match follows exactly the pixels inside what you drew — a rectangle, an ellipse or a lasso, so a round subject is not pulled off by the background in a box's corners. Set the search area and the minimum match; it says where it stopped if it lost hold.
- Location, rotation and scale follows a subject that turns or comes nearer; Follow its turn and size makes a layer turn and grow with it.
- Mending. Correct to what I drew fixes a frame that slipped; Track On from Here carries on; One Frame steps through a tricky stretch by hand; Tidy cuts away frames where it lost hold, smooths jitter or joins two tracks of the same thing.
- Stabilising. Steady a hand-held shot — keeping the camera's own move, or locking to the first frame — and, with two tracks, take out its turn and zoom as well as its drift.
- Lenses. Wide lenses bend straight lines. Shot Lens straightens a clip so tracks follow the straightened picture, then bends your graphics the same way so they sit in the shot. If you don't know the lens, paint along a few edges that are straight in the world — door frames, horizons — and Find the Lens from Strokes On works it out.
Motion Core: 3D
Motion Core in sixteen seconds.
Build a scene. Layer ▸ 3D ▸ New Scene, then add a Cube, Sphere, Light, Camera or Ground from the same menu. Pick an object to move it, or give it a Deformer or a Boolean (one solid cut from or joined to another). Every object keys like any layer: turn on a row's stopwatch.
Pose a mannequin. For staging a shot or a storyboard, Add Mannequin puts an artist's jointed figure in the scene. Hold Command and drag an arm, a leg, the spine or the head, and that joint turns towards the pointer; or type a joint's Turn, Tilt and Roll. Mannequin Pose starts from Standing, Sitting, Walking, Running, Pointing or Reaching; Mirror Pose swaps left and right; Command-drag a hand or foot and the elbow or knee follows.
Pose it from a photograph. Mannequin Pose ▸ From a Photo… and a photograph of one person: the mannequin stands as they stand. Then set what one picture cannot say — a hand's twist, how far an arm reaches towards you.
Raise a picture into a relief. Layer ▸ 3D ▸ Relief from Picture… turns a flat picture into a solid with real depth — something you can place, light and film, with the picture on its face. The first time, it installs Apple's depth model (50 MB, Apache-2.0).
Make an object from photographs. Photograph an object all round — 20 or more pictures, overlapping, in steady light — put them in one folder and choose Layer ▸ 3D ▸ 3D Object from Photos…. The model is made on your Mac and arrives as a new 3D scene.
Gaussian splats. File ▸ Import Gaussian Splats… brings in a .ply or .splat capture — the scanning technique that records a real place as millions of soft points — beside your objects, cameras and lights, to film it.
Generate a picture from a staged shot. Pose the figures and frame the camera, then Generate a Picture from the Shot… and say what the shot should become: the image model paints a picture that keeps your staging, and you set how far it may stray.
Taking 3D out. Export Scene as USD… writes the scene for other 3D programs, and render passes can be written as EXR or a layered PSD — see every way to export.
From animation to film
A canvas animated in Anime Core can be sent straight into the cut — View ▸ Workspace ▸ Place on the Timeline — and an animation is exported like any film: up to 1080p free, 4K and 8K with Pro.
Where to go next
Designing in Graphics Core · Cutting film · Grading · The overview
Download Accord Suite — free, for the Mac.