ArcMotion

Arc Motion

Arc Motion is an animation tool that lives inside Minecraft. Instead of building animations in another program and loading them in to see how they look, you make them right in your own world, on your own character, with your own skin. You pose the player, set keyframes on a timeline, and press play to see exactly what it will look like in game, because it is the game.

The player model in Arc has real elbows and knees. Forearms and shins move on their own instead of being stuck to one straight block like vanilla limbs, so you can make a proper punch, a crouch, a sword swing or a wave that actually bends. Whatever you hold in your hands, and any armour you're wearing, follows the pose too.

Press O in game to open the editor. Your character stays standing in the world and the editor builds itself around it. Hold the right mouse button and move the mouse to look around, and while you're holding it, W, A, S and D fly you around, with Space and Sneak taking you up and down. The mouse wheel zooms, and Ctrl with the mouse wheel makes the editor's panels bigger or smaller if they feel cramped. If you lose track of your character, F brings the camera back to it. The number keys give you quick views: 1 for the front, 3 and 9 for the sides, 7 from above, 5 for perspective, and 0 lets you look out through the character's own eyes.

Posing and keyframing

Click a body part to select it and grab the gizmo to turn it. R switches to the rotate gizmo and T to the move gizmo. For arms and legs you can press K to turn on IK, which lets you drag a hand or a foot to where you want it and the rest of the limb follows. While you're using IK, the square bracket keys swing the elbow or knee around so it points the way you want.

When a pose looks right, press Q to set a keyframe at the playhead on the lane you last clicked. Move along the timeline, change the pose, key it again, and Arc fills in the motion between. Press E to choose how a keyframe eases in and out, then a number key to pick one. Ctrl+A selects every key, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V copy and paste them, and Delete gets rid of the ones you've selected. Everything can be undone with Ctrl+Z and redone with Ctrl+Y, and a whole drag only counts as one undo step, so you never have to tap your way back through a hundred tiny moves.

Space or P plays and pauses. If you want to see where a limb has been and where it's going, O turns on onion skin ghosts and H shows a motion arc. J toggles the highlight on the part you have selected. When you're happy, Ctrl+S saves. Esc closes the editor and will ask you to save first if you forgot.

To see your animation without the editor in the way, press F1. That hides everything and plays it back. In that view, 1 is a free camera, 2 follows your character, 3 looks through their eyes, and 4 uses a camera you've keyed yourself. F1 or Esc takes you back to editing.

The Library

Everything you save shows up in the Library as a card with a thumbnail in your skin. Double click a card to open it. You can rename or delete animations from there as well.

Arc Flash

Arc Flash is a recorder and a little film set rolled into one. Press R while you're playing to start recording and press it again to stop. A recording can run for up to five minutes. Later you can open it as a scene and move through it like a film: pause, scrub back and forth, fly the camera anywhere, and keyframe a camera path through the action. You can also drop a character into the scene, give it one of your animations, and draw it a path to walk or run along. Press F1 to watch the whole thing through the camera you set up, looping if you like. Your recordings and scenes open with /arc flash.

The editor, Arc Flash, the Library and the /arc commands only open in creative mode. If you leave creative while the editor is open, your work is saved and the editor closes. Animations you've made still play in survival.

Commands

/animation_editor opens the editor, the same as pressing O. /arc flash opens your recordings and scenes. /arc record start, with an optional name, begins a recording and /arc record stop ends it. /arc camera on and off decide whether an animation is allowed to move your view, and /arc camera strength, from 0 to 1, sets how much it can. Both keys, O and R, can be changed in Options, Controls, under Arc.

Good to know

 Single player is the focus right now; multiplayer hasn't been finished or properly tested yet. Arc doesn't add any gameplay. There are no new items, no combat and no stats. Your animations are saved as ordinary files in the animations folder in your Minecraft directory, so they're easy to back up or share.

If something breaks or looks wrong, leave a comment saying what you were doing just before it happened. A screenshot helps a lot.