Keying & Auto-Capture

▶Video tutorial — coming soon

What a key is

A key is a frame number.

ORC does not store your pose. It stores the number of the Harmony frame where you posed the character. At Compose time — and only then — it reads the rig live at those frames.

Everything below follows from that:

• Keying is instant. Pressing F6 writes a number. There is no round trip to Harmony, nothing to wait for.
• A layer can key with zero targets. The frame belongs to the layer, not to the nodes. You can lay out a whole grid of frames before you have decided what it moves.
• Undo never touches your scene. Compose is the single place ORC writes to Harmony.
• Editing is non-destructive. Go back to frame 861, fix the eyebrow, re-compose. The change comes with it.

Setting and removing keys

Key	Action
F6	Set Key / Capture
F7	Remove Key

These two come from your Harmony configuration — they are whatever you have bound to Insert Keyframe and Delete Keyframe. Change them in Harmony's Edit → Keyboard Shortcuts; ORC follows, and will not let you rebind them on its side.

F6 and F7 follow your mouse, not your focus

They dispatch on what the cursor is hovering, which is why they work while a spin box has focus.

Hovering	F6 keys
The Navigator's grid	The active layer, at this snap
A pose layer's grid	That layer, at that snap
A driver's knob	That driver's value
A look-at field	That one field
The look-at joystick	Every look-at field at once
Nothing relevant	Nothing — the key is swallowed

After a successful capture, every visible grid cursor flashes green and the status line reads "Captured 12 target(s) @ frame 861 (Eyebrows)".

When it refuses

Message	Meaning
"This extreme is shared from the Front (read-only) — author it on the Front face."	A shared side belongs to the front face.
"No targets to capture."	Nothing to pose — though in frames-first the layer's frame is still recorded.

The frames-first loop

1. Click a snap in the layer's grid.
2. Go to an empty frame in Harmony's timeline.
3. Pose the character with Harmony's own tools.
4. With the cursor over ORC's grid, press F6.

The snap turns green and shows the frame number.

Left-click does not move your playhead

Clicking a navigator snap moves the rig cursor but leaves the timeline alone, so you can keep stamping keys without the playhead running away. Middle-click and the arrow keys do jump.

If you navigate to a snap that has no keyframe yet, ORC tells you rather than loading anything: "This snap has no keyframe yet — run the Unroll Wizard (or key the rig) to populate it."

Typing frames directly

You do not have to stand on a frame to key it.

Gesture	Effect
Double-click a snap	Inline editor. Accepts arithmetic. 0 clears the snap.
Shift + wheel	Step that snap's frame ±1.

After a single frame edit, ORC jumps Harmony to the frame you typed and runs auto-capture for that side. After a bulk write — a fill, a preset — it does neither: a bulk write is a data operation, and you are not standing at those frames. (A 7 × 3 grid over a 13-position knob is 273 snaps; you do not want 273 timeline jumps.)

Auto-capture

The small dot at the right of the editor's address bar — off, on. It starts off, and its startup state is a preference.

Auto-Capture frames (On) When ON: empty snap points auto-capture deformations + drawings AND record the current Harmony frame for the pose.

With it on, moving onto an empty snap records the frame you are parked on. Pose, move, pose, move — no F6.

It deliberately refuses in four cases:

It will not fire when	Why
The snap already has data	An authored frame is data. Overwriting it with the playhead is how you lose work.
The timeline never moved	If the snap you just left already owned this frame, stamping would just leak that number forward.
The layer is a control's knob	Its dimension already belongs to the control, so auto-capture leaves it alone. You can still key it by hand. An extra knob auto-keys like any layer.
The mode is off

Frame symmetry

A frame authored on any page authors to every page.

All pages of a layer share one frame per snap — pages differ in which nodes they drive, not in when the pose happens. So one gesture stamps the same snap across every page, and you never have to key the same expression three times.

Removing keys

There are two ways to clear a snap, and they reach the same place:

• Remove Key — F7, or the snap's right-click menu. On a snap the reference has a frame for, the emptied cell keeps the yellow ring — removal is divergence too.
• Typing 0 into the snap, which is just an edit whose new value happens to be "none".

Either way the snap empties, the number goes back to —, and the dot goes grey. Both are mirror-aware: with mirroring on, the flipped snap clears too, because a frame edit always writes the twin — putting a number in or taking it out.

The one thing worth remembering is what does not happen: neither of them touches the pose. See below.

A snap holds a frame, and that is all

It is worth being precise about what gets removed, because it is less than it sounds. A snap stores one thing: the frame number. The pose itself — the deformations, the transforms, the exposed drawing — is never copied into the rig file; it stays on the Harmony timeline, and Compose reads it live at that frame.

So removing a key does not delete a pose. It forgets where the pose was. The drawing at that frame is still sitting in your scene, untouched, and re-typing the number brings it straight back.

Bulk clears

All in-memory and all undoable, which is why none of them asks for confirmation.

Command	Clears
Clear Snap Pose · All Pose Layers Ctrl+Delete	This snap, across every layer
Clear Pose Layer Keys at Current MC Snap	This layer, at the current control snap
Clear Pose Layer Keys (Current Knob)	This layer, on the active knob only
Clear All Pose Layer Keys	This layer, everywhere
Clear Current Knob (All Pose Layers)	Every layer, current knob only
Clear All Keys	Everything

Only the first has a shortcut by default. Bind the others in Preferences if you use them, and the combos appear beside them in the right-click menus.

Each reports what it did — "Cleared 84 snap(s)" or "Nothing to clear".

The context menus

A layer's gridThe NavigatorA look-at fieldThe look-at joystick

Item
Set Key F6
Remove Key F7
Fill Grid
Copy Grid / Paste Grid
Clear All Pose Layer Keys at this Head
Clear All Pose Layer Keys
Clear Pose Layer Keys at this Knob
Restore Reference Frame / …on This Grid

Suppressed entirely on a knob's grid and on a shared side column.

Item
Set Key F6
Remove Key F7
Clear Snap Pose · All Pose Layers
Clear Current Knob Keys · All Pose Layers
Clear All Keys

On a 1-D control — and on a knob, or the pose layer a look-at or a driver keys across — the Navigator shows a slider instead of a grid. It carries the same menu, the same five actions: the gesture must not depend on which shape the navigator happens to take.

Item
Set Key F6
Remove Key F7
Set as Default
Reset to Default
Driver ▸

Item
Set Key (all look-at fields) F6
Remove Key (all look-at fields) F7
Reset to center
Re-center on release

Reading what is keyed — and what changed

Mark	Where	Meaning
	A grid	The active node has a key at that snap
	A slider	The active node has a key at that tick
	A grid	That snap's frame has changed since the rig was brought in
	A slider	That tick's frame has changed since the rig was brought in — carried on the tick's head, since a line has no outside to ring
	A grid	Removed — empty, but the reference has a frame here that was deleted
	A slider	Removed on a slider — the tick goes empty with a yellow head
Frame number	A grid	Which frame that snap points at
A green flash on the cursor	Every visible grid and slider	A key was just recorded

The Navigator shows only the active node's keys. On a driver page, the pose green is suppressed at source and replaced by that driver's keys — otherwise a rig that keys every snap would light up completely and tell you nothing.

Related

• Grids & Snaps — the surface you key on
• Fill Grid & Fill Dimensions — keying many snaps at once
• History & Undo
• Compose — where the frames finally get read