Docs / Getting started / The tool window

The tool window

A map of the numbered workflow cards, and what the Animatica Timeline is for.

The window docks natively into the 3ds Max main window, and Max restores its dock position across sessions. Text fields inside it are flagged so Max's single-key hotkeys do not swallow your typing — you can type a prompt containing any letter without the viewport reacting.

The Animatica tool window as it opens: the Animatica header with the Timeline button at the top right, then the Model, Skeleton and Text to Motion cards, with the Skeleton pill reading "not created".

#The cards

Everything is one scrolling column of collapsible, numbered cards. The numbers are the workflow order, not a hierarchy.

Card	Purpose	Visible by default
00 · Model	Which model generates, and the knobs only that model has	Yes
01 · Skeleton	Create, adopt, pick or delete the rig	Yes
02 · Motion Import	Load motion from a file on disk	No — Settings ▸ Interface reveals it
03 · Text to Motion	Generation parameters, output placement, constraints, and the Generate button	Yes
04 · Single Pose	One pose at the current frame	Yes
05 · Console	The log every other window writes to	Opens as its own window

Settings is not a card here. It opens as a separate window from the Animatica menu, and shares this window's state. One more window opens the same way: the Console.

The Animatica tool window with every section expanded: Model, Skeleton, and Text to Motion with its General, Advanced and Output Target groups, the collapsed Constraints sub-card, the Generate Motion button, and Single Pose at the bottom.

Many groups carry their own Reset, scoped to the fields that group owns — resetting Advanced restores its parameters but deliberately leaves the group's enable toggle alone, so a reset does not collapse the panel you are editing.

#The Animatica Timeline

The timeline has no home inside the panel. It lives in a floating window that opens by itself the first time the tool window is shown, and is re-opened from the Timeline button in the top right of the window header. Closing it hides it — your prompts are not lost.

It is where the work is authored in time:

Prompt blocks. Press Add Prompt, or double-click empty space to create a block and edit it straight away. Drag a block to move it, drag its edge to resize. One generation builds a single request out of every block on the ruler.
Constraint pins. Six quick-add buttons in the header capture a constraint of their type at the playhead; pins then sit on the ruler and their markers in the viewport, in matching colours.
The header also carries the skeleton selector and the namespace field — the same controls as in card 01 · Skeleton, kept in lock-step with them — plus Convert Animkeys, an inline pose prompt with Pose, Generate, Save Prompts / Load Prompts, the zoom controls and the mode readout, which reads Replace.

The scene range is yours — the timeline follows the scene's range and frame rate live, and Animatica never writes the scene range back.

Prompts travel inside the .max file: they are stored on the scene root in a binary-safe slot that survives save and load. Save Prompts and Load Prompts additionally write them to, and read them from, a file of their own, which is useful for moving a set of prompts between scenes.

#When a button seems to do nothing

Open the Console. Most failures are logged there as a line rather than raised at you, and nothing is lost by opening it late — the main window logs whether or not the Console has ever been opened, and the buffer is replayed when it opens.