Your first graph

Place a shape, change it, animate it, and watch it render, in about five minutes.

1. Add a circle

Press Tab anywhere on the node graph to open the search palette. Type circle, then press Enter or click the result. A semi-transparent Circle follows your cursor: click on the canvas to place it, or press Esc to change your mind.

The circle appears in the viewport straight away. Every node cooks and previews live.

The palette searches names, keywords, tags and descriptions. If you are unsure what a node is called, describe what it does: blur, noise, bounce. It opens showing the Generate family, so a query is what reaches the rest.

2. Change its parameters

The circle's controls sit on the node body. Find the radius field.

Change the radius and the colour. The viewport updates as you go. Parameter labels are the names the node declares, so they read as stroke_width rather than Stroke Width. Parameter widgets covers the controls themselves.

3. Animate one parameter

  1. Move the playhead to the start of the timeline.

  2. Hover the radius field and press K to set a keyframe at the current value.

  3. Drag the playhead forward.

  4. Change the radius to a new value, then press K again.

Keep the pointer on the field. K keyframes whatever is under it, and with nothing hovered it keyframes every parameter on the selected node instead.

Values between the two keyframes are interpolated. Press Space to play: the circle grows and shrinks as the playhead loops. Press Space again to pause.

A keyframed control takes a faint orange wash on the node body, so animated parameters are identifiable at a glance. To shape the in-between motion, open the curve editor.

4. See it render

The graph is already rendering in the viewport, with no separate render step to wait for. As you wire up more nodes, the viewport shows the live result of the whole graph.

To chain nodes, drag from the circle's output socket to the input of another node.

The circle then stops drawing on its own, because the node you wired it into is now the thing being shown. Making the wire turns the circle's opacity down to 0, which is a value you can see and change: find the circle in the Layer Manager, drag its opacity back up, and both the circle and the node downstream of it appear together. Cutting the wire puts it back to 1.

Shortcuts

See also