Hi there! I’ve been messing around with figma motion for the past day or so, and am loving it. This is going to speed up my workflow so much as a motion designer at a company who was previously primarily using After Effects.Â
There are a few core features that are missing that would really take this to the next level:
Parenting
Probably the biggest thing missing for me. Right now there is no way to link a layer to another layer, seemingly. An example of when this would be useful:
- I’m animating a logo, and I want the word to appear from behind the glyph. The glyph is moving left, and the type is moving right
- I have a mask for my text that needs to move left with the glyph, while the type animates right (opposite the mask)
- There is currently no way to link the movement of the mask to the movement of the glyph to reveal my text, if I want the text to move independently of the glyph (because the mask is linked to the text, separating it and putting it in the glyph’s movement group means it is no longer masking the text)
Probably a million different reasons parenting would be helpful, but this is just one I ran into while messing around recreating our logo animation in Figma Motion
Bezier curves for motion paths
As far as I can tell, motion paths can only be straight lines. Would love to be able to grab handles at either end of a motion path and allow that movement to happen along a curve
Graph editor
Right now, if I want motion to continue across multiple keyframes, there’s no “overall” graph editor; I can only edit easing between two keyframes. Being able to link graphs together for more continuous and smoother motion would be great
Deeper autolayout compatibility & integration
A huge unlock for my team would be building animations in figma, and allowing our partners to translate those layouts directly in figma, with those translations immediately transfering to the animation. This requires the use of Autolayout, since elements in a composition need to scale to longer or shorter text strings. However, in the current implementation, there is not a ton of animation specific control around autolayout. If I want a button with text, for example, to have autolayout, and I want to animate in a loading spinner within that button, there aren’t a lot of controls to allow me to easily transition in new elements to an autolayout frame, while still allowing for that frame to grow/shrink based on the text string contained with it.
Trim paths with a closed shape
Seems like you can’t add trim paths to a closed shape right now
Ease copying
Right now you need to click an ease, move my mouse to the upper right, double click, copy it, click another ease, move my mouse to the upper right, double click, and paste it. Simple way to do this would be to select the ease on the timeline, cmd/ctrl+C, and select another ease on the timeline and cmd/ctrl+P.
I’m sure I will have more, but these were my initial observations after working on a couple simple animations with the tool. So excited for this to be developed further!