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 beat:
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. There is also a project-level switch in Forge's settings if you want idle motion off everywhere regardless.