Masking and clipping are the major new features in Keyshape 1.6. One great use case for them is to animate revealing text or graphics, like this one:
The masking and clipping help documentation explains how to use the new masking and clipping features.
This version has also other changes. The timeline shows now a play range, which can be used to play back only a portion of the animation. Web browser previews and exports can split the animation to the play range times.
The play options have been simplified to play the animation once or to loop it. The “Normal” mode has been removed, but the same effect can be achieved by using an infinite play range.
Creating looping SVG animations has been made easier. SVG exporting includes an option to loop the animation forever. It will loop the entire animation just like animated GIFs.
The Lottie plugin has been improved. It supports play ranges, masking and path trimming. Only basic path trimming is supported, which means line animations from start to end. They are mapped to dash offset animations in Keyshape, which makes the support for path trimming a bit limited.
Previewing Lottie animations in a web browser has been added. Just select Lottie as the preview option and press the Preview button. The animation will be played back by the Lottie-web player. To make this possible, support for previewing was added to the plugin API.
Lottie uses frame numbers in its API calls, but it wasn’t possible to see frame numbers in Keyshape. To make it easier to work with Lottie animations, it is now possible to display time as seconds, frames or timecodes. It makes designing animations for Lottie and other frame based formats easier.
Don’t forget to update the AVD and Lottie plugins to use the new masking, clipping and play range features.
For full list of changes in Keyshape 1.6, see the release notes.