Animation States
An animation in Molkit is a sequence of states. Each state is a snapshot of your content at one moment, drawn inside its own framed region of the canvas. During playback, Molkit holds each state, then interpolates matched objects to the next state in order. You need at least two states before Preview and Export become available.
Enter animation mode
Click the play-triangle button near the right end of the tool toolbar, or press Shift+A. The animation toolbar appears with the state controls (New State, Duplicate, Delete) plus Preview, Export, Match, and Center. Press Esc or click Exit to leave animation mode. You can also double-click a state frame’s header while outside animation mode to enter it with that state active.
Create a state
Click ”+ New State”. The cursor becomes a crosshair. Click and drag on the canvas to draw the state frame; atoms inside the rectangle, bonds whose atoms are both inside, and annotations inside all become the contents of the new state. The crosshair stays armed so you can draw several frames in a row. Press Esc to stop drawing.
States are not separate copies of your document. The objects stay on the canvas, and each state records which objects belong to it by ID. Anything you later draw or move inside a frame is swept into that state the next time you enter animation mode.
State boxes on the canvas
Each state renders as a rounded rectangle with a header showing its name (“State 1”, plus a custom title if you set one). The active state has a solid blue border; inactive states are gray and dashed. Outside animation mode the frames stay visible but dimmed.
- Click inside a frame to make that state active.
- Drag the header to move the frame together with its contents.
- Drag the square handles on the active frame’s corners and edges to resize it.
- Click the eye icon in the header to exclude the state from preview and export. The frame grays out and its transitions show no duration. Click again to include it.
Shift+drag the header to clone the state and drag the copy into place.
Duplicate a state
Select a state and click Duplicate. Molkit clones every object in it with fresh IDs, places the copy in a new frame to the right, inserts the new state directly after the source in the sequence, and auto-matches the copies to their originals so the transition interpolates cleanly. States play in the order they were created, so duplicating is also how you insert a step in the middle: duplicate the state before the gap, then edit the copy.
Edit, rename, and delete
With a state active, edit its contents using the normal drawing and selection tools. Move atoms, change bond orders, add or remove annotations. Adjacent states differ only in what you change, and the engine animates between them.
To rename a state, double-click its title in the state strip (see below), type a custom title, and press Enter.
To delete the active state, click Delete in the animation toolbar or press Delete with nothing selected on the canvas. Only the frame and its sequence entry are removed; the drawn objects stay on the canvas.
State strip and timing
A thumbnail strip along the bottom of the window shows every state and the duration of each transition between adjacent states. It appears whenever the animation has at least one state, even outside animation mode. Click a thumbnail to activate that state and pan to it. Right-click the duration label between two thumbnails to apply a Quick, Normal, or Slow speed preset to that single transition.
Properties split as follows:
- Per state: title, frame position and size, the excluded (eye) toggle.
- Per transition: hold and transition durations, set with the right-click speed presets.
- Global: state order, total duration (shown in the animation toolbar), pivot mode, and the object matches for each state pair.