Animation Events

Animation events let you attach gameplay data to specific frames of an animation. Instead of authoring collision shapes and spawn points by hand in your engine, you can place them on the animation in Blender, where you can see them alongside the character motion they belong to. On export, these events travel with the animation so your game can react to them at runtime.

There are three kinds of event: hitboxes, spawners, and custom events. Every event is tied to a frame or range of frames on the currently selected animation.

Opening the panel

Animation events are edited from the Anim Events sub-panel, found under the animation panel in the “Playable” tab of the 3D viewport side panel (open it with the n key). The sub-panel is collapsed by default and only appears when an animation is selected.

The panel shows a list of the events on the current animation. Use the button to add an event, which opens a menu where you pick the kind to create, and the button to remove the selected event. Selecting an event in the list reveals its settings below.

Events belong to the individual animation you have selected. Switching to a different animation shows that animation’s own set of events.

Shared settings

Every event, regardless of kind, has a few common fields:

• Label — A human readable name shown in the event list.
• Frame range — Hitbox and custom events are active over a Start and End frame. Spawners fire on a single Frame instead.
• Tag — An arbitrary integer passed through to the game engine. Use it to distinguish events of the same kind, for example separating a light attack hitbox from a heavy one.

Hitboxes

A hitbox is a collision shape that is active across a range of frames and carries a damage and knockback payload. It is the right tool for attacks, where you want the character to deal damage only while a specific part of the animation is playing.

Hitbox events expose the following settings:

• Shape — Either Cube or Sphere.
• Size — The dimensions of the shape along each axis. For a sphere this is the diameter.
• Offset — The position of the shape relative to the rig root.
• Rotation — The orientation of the shape as an XYZ Euler rotation.
• Damage — A damage value passed to the game engine.
• Knockback — A direction and strength for pushing whatever the hitbox strikes, expressed in the armature’s local space. The vector’s length encodes the strength, so it is not automatically normalized. Use the Length slider to scale the strength while keeping the direction, the Normalize button to make it unit length, or Clear to reset it to zero.

Spawners

A spawner marks a single frame where your game should spawn something, such as a projectile, a particle effect, or another entity. Spawners store a position and rotation like a hitbox, plus an optional velocity for giving the spawned entity an initial push.

• Frame — The single frame on which the spawner fires.
• Position — Where the spawn should occur, relative to the rig root.
• Rotation — The orientation of the spawn point.
• Velocity — An optional initial velocity in the armature’s local space. As with knockback, the vector’s length is the magnitude, and a Length slider scales it while preserving direction. When non-zero, the velocity is drawn as an arrow in the viewport.

Custom events

A custom event is a free-form hook for anything the other kinds do not cover. When the event fires, your game calls a named method and passes it a string payload.

• Method — The name of the method to call when the event fires.
• Payload — A free-form string passed to that method.

Custom events have no viewport geometry, so they are edited entirely from the panel.

Editing events in the viewport

Hitboxes and spawners are drawn in the 3D viewport so you can position and shape them against the character. By default, only events active on the current frame are shown. Toggle the button in the panel to show all events at once regardless of frame.

To manipulate events interactively, press Edit Mode in the panel. This starts a modal editing session where the viewport captures input for working with events. The available controls are:

• Left click selects the event under the cursor.
• g / r / s move, rotate, and scale the selected event. Scaling applies only to hitboxes, since spawners have no size. While transforming, x, y, and z lock to an axis.
• i opens a floating popup with the selected event’s full details.
• x or del removes the selected event.
• esc exits edit mode.

You can also drag the knockback arrow on a selected hitbox, or the velocity arrow on a selected spawner, directly in the viewport. Clicking and dragging from the event’s center pulls out a fresh vector even when it started at zero.

Edit mode stays tied to the animation you started editing. Switching to another animation exits edit mode automatically so you never edit events on the wrong clip by mistake.

Exporting events

Animation events are written into export formats that support them. The Godot GLB pipeline emits each event as a method track on the corresponding Godot animation, firing at the event’s frame with its payload. The integer Tag is carried through so your handlers can branch on it.