Short answer: Idle motion gives standing sprites ambient life - a gentle breathing rhythm and a subtle head sway while their feet stay planted. Pick one of five profiles per sprite in the Sprites dock - relaxed, quick, heavy, exhausted, or none - each with its own pace and weight. You can also switch a character's motion mid-story with a Sprite: Motion event, and the whole system respects each reader's reduce-motion setting.
The five profiles
- Relaxed - slow, calm, shallow breaths. The everyday resting state.
- Quick - a brisk, light rhythm. Alert, nervous, or energetic.
- Heavy - deep, labored breathing with a slight forward lean at the top of each breath.
- Exhausted - the slowest, deepest rhythm, and every few breaths ends in a longer sigh.
- None - perfectly still.
The sway bends from the head down while the feet stay planted, so characters read as standing people, not drifting cutouts.
Setting a character's resting motion
Open the Sprites dock, expand the sprite, and choose a profile under Idle motion. Depth, Rate, and Sway sliders fine-tune the chosen profile - a shallower breath, a slower pace, more or less head movement. New sprites start from the project-wide default in the dock's settings cog.
Switching motion mid-story
Idle motion can change as the story does. Insert a Sprite: Motion event to switch a character's profile at any event:
sprite motion mara exhausted
From that moment on, the character breathes like someone who just got bad news. Choose none to stop their idle motion entirely. A mid-story switch applies the chosen profile at its standard strength - the fine slider tuning belongs to the resting default in the Sprites dock.
How it behaves on stage
Idle motion steps aside while the sprite is doing something deliberate - an animated Move or a fired effect takes over, then the idle rhythm resumes. It is a purely ambient layer: it never changes where a character officially stands, so scrubbing the timeline and precise positioning stay exact.
Readers who prefer less motion
If a reader's device asks for reduced motion, idle motion damps down to near stillness automatically - no setup needed on your side. To keep it off, set each sprite's idle motion to Still in the Sprites dock, and set the default for new sprites in the dock's settings cog.