Grid Builder

A grid arranges several layers by a rule — rows and columns, a ring, a spiral, a wave, a scatter, a 3D sphere, or a curve you draw — and then behaves as one layer. Move it, scale it, rotate it, keyframe it, put effects on it: everything applies to the whole arrangement at once.

The rule stays live. Change the column count, the margin or the layout family and every member re-flows. Add a layer and the grid makes room for it. Ungroup and every layer comes back exactly where it was.

The grid panel has three tabs directly under the layer’s name: Grid (the arrangement), Effectors (Focus / Proximity), and Options (the layer’s own inspector — speed curve, transitions, transform, keyframes, filters, effects).

Make a grid

Select two or more layers on the timeline (Shift-click to add to the selection), then click Use as Grid in the right panel.

The layers collapse into one Grid layer at the same spot on the timeline. Cell 1 is the topmost of the layers you selected.

To start empty instead, use Add Layer → Grid and pull layers in afterwards. With several layers already selected that entry reads Grid over N layers and builds the grid straight from them.

The Members list

The MEMBERS section is the grid’s contents, in cell order.

• Drag the grip to move a layer to another cell.
• Untick a layer to leave its cell empty — the remaining cells close up and renumber. The layer stays inside the grid; tick it again to bring the cell back.
• The pencil opens that layer on its own: the grid’s sections step aside and the layer’s full inspector takes over the panel, with ‹ Return to grid at the top. Everything is editable there except position, rotation and scale — those belong to the grid, so the TRANSFORM fields, the PRS keyframe tracks (scale, rotate, translate, X/Y %) and the whole Motion Path section are locked out.
• The copy button next to the pencil duplicates a member — fresh ids all the way down, so even a nested container clones cleanly — and slots the copy into the very next cell.
• The arrow on the right ejects a layer back onto the timeline.
• Add layers… lists everything else on the timeline; tick what you want and confirm.

A grid holds up to 64 layers.

Layouts

The GRID section picks the layout family, and only that family’s controls are shown.

Rectangular	Rows and columns inside the margins. Columns, gaps, margins, fill order (rows / columns / snake), brick offsets for alternate rows and columns, and whether a short final row centres or stays left-aligned.
Radial	One or more rings around the centre. Radius, ring count and spacing, start angle, sweep (under 360° makes an arc, with the first and last cells on its edges) and spin. Cells spread across the rings with the outer ones holding more.
Spiral	A sunflower (golden-angle) packing or a plain coil. Radius and turns.
Wave	A sine across the frame. Amplitude, frequency and phase — animate the phase to roll the wave sideways.
Scatter	Random inside the margins, plus an optional depth spread that pushes cells toward and away from the camera.
Spherical	An even shell of cells in 3D, filmed by the project camera, so cells at the back are genuinely further away. Radius, spin and tilt.
Path	Cells ride the layer’s own motion path. Picking Path adds a PATH section directly under the layout tiles: Draw path on canvas (click to drop anchors, drag anchors and handles to shape it), then Trim start / Trim end to carve out the stretch the cells use, Progress to slide them along it — animate that and they travel, looping on a closed curve — and Spread for how much of the trimmed stretch they occupy. Spacing is even along the curve by default so cells don’t bunch on tight corners. Leave the layer’s Follow Path off and only the cells travel; turn it on and the whole grid rides the curve too.

On the pathed shapes (Wave, Spiral, Path) a Twist control rolls the cells about their direction of travel, spread over the run — 360° reads as one full ribbon twist end to end — and composes with every Orientation mode.

Cell order decides which layer takes which cell — stack order, reversed, by name, or random. Seed drives every random the grid makes; the same seed always lays out the same way, in the preview and in the export. The button beside it re-rolls.

Show shape in view draws a dashed line through the cells in layout order, so the arrangement’s shape — and exactly which cell a stagger or twist affects next — is visible while authoring. It follows morphs, keyframes and effector pushes, and is preview-only: it never renders into exports.

Staggers

Radius, Cell scale and Rotate X / Y / Z carry a Stagger badge (a small layers icon; an active one shows its amount). It opens a popover with the per-cell amount and a Forward / Backward direction: the first cell (or the last, going Backward) keeps the base value and every next cell in layout order steps by another increment — growing runs, zig-zag rings, fanned decks, spiralling tilts. Rotation staggers compose in each card’s own frame on top of Orientation. All staggers are keyframable from the popover’s stopwatch, like every other grid parameter.

Cells

The CELLS section decides what happens inside each cell.

• Fit — Contain fits the whole layer inside its cell whatever its aspect ratio; Cover fills the cell and crops the overflow to it, so cells never bleed into each other; Fill stretches to the cell, ignoring the aspect ratio; Keep leaves each layer at its own size, which reduces the grid to pure positioning.
• Cell padding insets from the cell box; Cell scale multiplies afterwards and is the sizing knob — the automatic cell size follows the member count and the frame alone, so growing a ring’s Radius moves the cards apart instead of rescaling them.
• Orientation — every mode is a real 3D rotation, and they split two ways.

Grid-relative — they describe the card’s pose within the arrangement, so turning the grid turns them with it: Forward leaves each layer’s own rotation alone (including any 3D tilt it already had), and Along path aims the card in the direction of travel, in three dimensions when the curve carries depth.

View-relative — they describe the card’s pose relative to you, so they mean the same thing however the grid or the camera is rotated: Face screen aims each card’s face at the lens from its own position — a cell out at the frame edge or pushed through Z visibly turns to meet it — and To centre turns each card away from the arrangement’s middle. With no depth that would leave every card edge-on, so a flat layout reads as a clock face instead (facing you, tops pointing outward); give the grid Z depth, or use Spherical, and it becomes a genuine 3D fan.

• Rotate X / Y / Z — tilts, turns or rolls every card together, in each card’s own frame, on top of the Orientation. A small Rotate Z is the collage tilt; Rotate Y fans a wall of cards like louvres; on a Face-screen grid the cards tilt without losing their aim at the lens. All three are keyframable.
• Jitter — seeded position, rotation and scale wobble, measured against the cell box so it scales with the layout.

Depth

A composition is filmed through a 28° lens, which is a long one: pushing a cell 600px away only shrinks it a few percent. The DEPTH section is what turns a flat arrangement into a convincing 3D one.

• Z depth spreads the cells through depth, front to back along the layout order. Z anchor picks which end of that run sits on the camera plane, so adding depth doesn’t shove the whole arrangement toward or away from the lens.
• Scale by chooses the axis the size grades along — cell order, depth, or distance from the centre — and Scale front / Scale back are the percentages added at its two ends. A negative Scale back is what makes far cells recede.

Cells always stop short of the camera however large the Z push — past the lens they would vanish or turn inside out.

A sphere already carries its own depth; Z depth adds to it. Set Scale by to Depth (Z) with a negative Scale back and a spherical grid stops reading as a circle.

(The old Overscan control is gone — cells are clipped by the real camera frustum like any layer, so there is nothing left for it to recover.)

The grid is real 3D

A grid is a container like a sequence — one layer, with its own filters, opacity, blend mode, masks and transitions — but its cells are real objects in space, filmed by the project camera itself. It is the arrangement, not a photograph of the arrangement.

That means:

• Depth behaves like depth. Pan the camera and near cards slide past far ones; dolly in and you travel through the arrangement — push into a Spherical grid far enough and you are inside the ball, cards all around you.
• The grid’s own transform moves the arrangement. Rotate a rectangular grid 90° on Y and you get a wall running straight away from you, near cards large and far ones small. Pan, zoom and every keyframe on the grid layer move the cells in three dimensions.
• The 3D world view shows the cells. Orbit the editor camera and you see the actual arrangement in space — a sphere is a ball of cards, a Z run is a corridor — exactly what the camera will film.
• Face screen holds at any angle, and follows a rolled camera: each card is aimed at the lens’s true position.
• Cells are clipped by the real camera frustum, exactly like ordinary layers — a card pushed toward the lens leaves the frame the honest way, which is why Overscan has nothing left to do here.

One trade: motion blur on the grid layer doesn’t react to the grid’s own transform (per-member motion and camera work are unaffected).

Reveal

The REVEAL section animates the cells arriving: Fade, Pop, Rise, Spin, From centre, From edges or Random.

Duration is how long one cell takes; Stagger is the delay between cells (negative runs the wave backwards). Stagger by decides the order — cell order, ring, distance from the centre, or seeded random. Turn Exit too on and the cells leave again before the layer ends, in the same order.

This is not keyframes: it is a function of the grid layer’s own progress, so scrubbing the clip plays it.

Animating the grid itself

Every numeric control in the GRID and CELLS sections has a stopwatch. Clicking it adds a keyframe track for that parameter, starting flat at its current value — so turning it on never changes the frame. Shape it in the Keyframes panel or the graph editor like any other track.

Animating Radius opens a ring outward. Animating Spin Y turns a sphere. Animating Offset sends cells travelling along a path. Only the parameters the current layout actually uses offer a stopwatch.

Because the grid is one layer, its own transform, opacity, filters, effects, motion blur, layer transitions and motion path work exactly as they do on a video layer — on the whole arrangement.

Morphing between layouts

Numbers animate; the layout family is an either/or — there is no value halfway between a rectangle and a sphere. LAYOUTS is how the grid crosses that line: click Add layout and the current GRID becomes slot 0 of an ordered list, with a copy as slot 1. Change the copy’s mode on the tiles, and the new Mix control in MORPH travels the list — 0 → 1 blends the first pair, 1 → 2 the next, and the fractional part morphs the two arrangements per cell: cell 1 of the rectangle travels to where cell 1 of the sphere sits, size, rotation and opacity blending along the way.

Mix is an ordinary keyframe track (gr:layoutMix), so it gets the stopwatch, the Keyframes panel, the graph editor with custom easing, and a Hold key gives a hard cut between types. Keyframe it 0 → 1 → 2 and the grid is a rectangle that becomes a sphere that becomes a ring — one continuous, easable move.

Shaping lives in MORPH:

• Stagger spreads the move across the cells — at 0.35, cells leave one after another in rank order instead of sliding as a block. Stagger by picks the order (cell order, ring, distance, random), read off the layout the cells are leaving.
• Easing is each cell’s own ramp through the move.
• Arc bulges every cell’s travel outward through the middle of the move (negative implodes through the centre); Spin adds whole turns. Both vanish exactly at the endpoints, so a parked Mix never disturbs the layout.

Selecting a slot in LAYOUTS binds the GRID (and PATH) section to it — each slot owns only its own geometry. Everything else — fit, cell scale and padding, jitter, depth, effectors, the reveal, cell order and seed — is shared and rides continuously straight through a type change; a keyframed shared parameter never jumps at a morph. Deleting down to one slot folds that layout back into a plain grid.

One practical note: while Mix sits between two slots both layouts are computed each frame. That is usually invisible, but on a very full grid an explicit Cell size (instead of Auto) skips the densest part of the work.

Effectors

The panel has two tabs: Grid builds the arrangement, Effectors makes it react.

An effector produces one number per cell — how much does this cell matter right now — and every property you tick is blended from its normal value toward an effected one by that number. There are two, and only one can be live: they answer the same question, so running both would give a result you can’t reason about.

Focus

An animatable cell index with a falloff around it. Keyframe the index and the influence sweeps through the grid. Focus on picks the target: By index (the animatable index), or First / Last / Center item — the last three follow the member count, so the focus needs no retuning when layers come and go.

Measure by decides what “distance from the focus” means — cell order, row or ring, column, or distance on the canvas. Falloff shape is smooth, linear, ripple (a decaying wave, so the focus throws rings instead of one bump) or step. Wrap around lets a ring keep rippling past its seam instead of stopping at the ends.

Proximity

The distance to other layers on the timeline. Pick them with Choose layers… — they are referenced, not moved: they keep their channel, their own keyframes and their own look, and they never join the grid. Animating one of them is what animates the grid, so a single moving null can drive the whole arrangement.

Influence is full inside Range and fades to nothing over Falloff. Measure picks 2D distance, 3D distance, or a single axis; Combine sources decides how several stack (strongest, add, average).

Affect Near / Far

Flips which cells the effector reaches. It’s how you blur everything except the focus: tick Blur, then set Affect to Far.

What an effector drives

Scale, Opacity, Rotation, Push Z, and — proximity only — Look at source, which turns each cell toward its nearest source. Add property extends the list with the full filter set: Blur, Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Hue rotate, Grayscale and Sepia.

Amounts are what a fully effected cell gets, added on top of whatever the layer already has. The grid’s own position, rotation and scale are untouched, so Ungroup still restores every layer exactly.

Ungroup

Select the grid and click Ungroup grid. Every layer returns to the timeline with its original position, rotation and scale intact — the grid supplied those at draw time and never wrote to the layers themselves.

Notes and limits

• A grid is not double-click-enterable the way a sequence is. Members are edited from the MEMBERS list.
• Members that end before the grid does leave their cell empty for the rest of the layer.
• Motion blur applies to the grid as a whole, not to individual cells.
• A cell is drawn at the grid’s own resolution, so a cell scaled down to a quarter of the frame gets a quarter of the plate’s pixels — the same as any scaled layer.
• Rendering a project that contains a grid requires a PRO licence. Building and previewing one does not.