Absolutely, smart animate is pretty handy feature but being unable to edit timeline for each layer is drawback in many cases.

I guess, Figma team will make this feature insane as usually 😉 but for inspiration here is example how Motion plugin for Figma do this:

Less Frames, clean prototype

• Interactive components helped in that case a lot. Timeline will do the same.
• No needs for frames with “middle states” and timeouts.

Adobe After Effects is overkill for tiny UI animations

• After Effects doesn’t have nice UX in the matter of creating tiny animations.
• Once Timeline in Figma allows you to easily create slick animations, then it will be the only one tool for UI/Motion designers.
• I believe that SMIL animations and SVG2 become standard for web and apps.
• There isn’t editor which allows you to export animations as SVG + SMIL. There is an opportunity to break this bottleneck and finally get rid of bodymotion plugin and Lottie files which do the service but it’s pain to deal with it in development (being unable to see the preview, easily modify the animation, dealing with source AEP files and exported JSON files doesn’t support smooth handover between designers and developers).

It’s really needed

Definitely! Is there any progress? 🙂

Would really love to see this added, especially now that InVision Studio is sunset.

Being able to stagger and delay animations within smart animate would be absolutely HUGE.

Hey everyone 👋.

I’ve been playing around with creating a plugin for this:

Love to get your thoughts.

There are a few challenging things about Figma native animations like when changing animations running in parallel to have different timing or easing may require creating a component.

E.g. if you want to create a face that is winking, might require components for the eyes, mouth and so on. But you might not start out that way, so the timeline will have to be able to convert these to components when necessary.

This looks awesome. Are you actually playing the animation in the canvas, and not in prototype mode? That would be cool!

Would be amazing to have this functionality! This would also be an amazing addition to Figma Slides to make slides even more dynamic.

Figma Config 2025 release please 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼