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Question

Issue with smart animate in components

  • May 16, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 167 views

Gareth Shelbourne

Hi all,


I’m running into an issue with Smart Animate that seems to be a recent regression. I’ve used Smart Animate successfully across multiple components in my file, and everything was working fine in Present mode until this past week.


Now, some animations that used to work perfectly are either:

• Not playing at all, or

• Playing incorrectly (e.g. jumpy, incomplete, or skipping interpolation)


Here’s what I’ve found through troubleshooting:

• The animations still work when I isolate the animated component and test it on its own.

• They break only when nested inside more complex parent components (which contain other nested instances).

• Detaching the parent instance or simplifying the nesting restores the expected animation behaviour.

• Clearing Figma’s cache and restarting the app had no effect.

• I haven’t changed anything in the component structure that would explain this — it genuinely seems to have broken out of the blue.


This leads me to suspect either:

• A recent Figma update changed how Smart Animate behaves in nested instances, or

• There’s now a stricter limit on how animation properties propagate through component boundaries.

 

Has anyone else run into this recently? Any tips, workarounds, or confirmation that this is a known issue would be greatly appreciated. 

 

Thanks!

2 replies

Continuum Clinical

Similar issues here. A component with smart animate after delay plays fine in preview, one placed inside another component (whose visibility is toggled via a boolean switch) the components state jumps from A-B instead of animating A-B


Muhammad Hashir

I need help with figma prototyping smart animate, I made a simple animation where a line increases its size using "change to" (I made into components and variants), this does work normally but when I put it inside another component, it stops working as it should. It still changes to the second variant but does not animate

Thanks in advance and if I am vague somewhere, please ask me, I do not know proper terms to explain it