The Navigator

▶Video tutorial — coming soon

The left column navigates. It never authors.

That one rule explains the whole design. When you are authoring a pose layer, that layer's own grid lives in the centre Editor, where you can type frame numbers into it. The Navigator shows the grids above it — the control it hangs from, the knob it keys across — as dots you move a cursor through, so you can say "…and now, at this head pose."

A control's grid on top, its knob's slider below.

Navigator versus Editor

	Navigator (left)	Editor (centre)
Shows	position dots, green keyed marks, frame badges	editable frame numbers, rulers, fill handles
You do	move the cursor, jump the timeline	edit frames, set and remove keys, fill, copy grids
Purpose	choose which pose of the parent you are authoring at	author this layer

The same snap of the rig can appear in both places at once: as a dot in the Navigator because your layer keys across it, and as an editable snap in the Editor because that layer is what you are authoring. A control never navigates itself — when the selected layer is a control's face, that control's card disappears.

Moving around

Gesture	Effect
Left-click a snap	Move there. The timeline stays put — so you can keep stamping keys without losing your place.
Middle-click a snap	Move there and jump Harmony to that snap's keyframe.
Shift + arrows	Step the cursor. Timeline stays put.
Ctrl + arrows	Step the cursor and jump the timeline.
Alt+← / Alt+→	Step the knob one position.

A 1-D dimension is drawn as a slider instead of a grid:

• ◀ / ▶ step one state; middle-clicking either also jumps the timeline.
• The two end anchors jump to the first and last state; middle-click to also jump the timeline. They are not decoration — see below.
• Middle-clicking the groove jumps to that state's frame.
• The handle snaps to ticks — it never rests between states.
• The counter on the right is 1-based: 3/13.
• A dimension with only one position hides its stepper entirely rather than showing a dead 1/1.

Which end is which

A slider does not always run left to right. In the Widget Editor you can lay it out horizontally or vertically, and reverse its direction — so "the top" and "the first state" are not the same thing on every rig.

That is what the two anchors are for:

Glyph	Marks
	The start of the travel — state 1
	The end — the last state

Whichever way the slider is drawn, the square is where the count begins and the diamond is where it ends. Without them a rotated or reversed slider gives you no way to tell.

The same pair appears on a 1-D grid in the Editor, and on a driver's slider knob, so the language is the same everywhere.

Reading the dots

Mark	Meaning
	An ordinary snap.
	The active node has its own key here — a pose frame, a driver value, a constraint state or a look-at key. One colour for all of them.
	The cursor, on an unkeyed snap.
	The cursor, on a keyed one.
	Modified — this snap's frame has changed since the rig was brought in.
	The cursor, on a modified snap — the yellow replaces its white border rather than adding a second ring.
	Removed — empty, but the reference has a frame here that was deleted.
	The cursor, on a removed snap — empty (blue) with the yellow border.
Number under a dot	The frame that snap points at.

On a slider the same signal has to take another shape: a tick is a line with no outside to ring, so a modified state turns its head — the end nearest the groove — yellow while the body keeps saying whether it is keyed. Park the handle on one and the handle takes a yellow ring, since sitting there it covers its own tick.

A navigator's yellow rolls up

On the authoring grid, yellow means this snap's frame diverged — exact, so you know which one to fix. On a navigator it means something addressed through here diverged: a position here names a whole slice of the rig, so the mark answers for the slice. A control snap lights when any layer or knob under it holds a diverged snap; a knob position lights when the page it creates does. Follow the yellow inward and the authoring grid points at the exact snap.

And it is not only pose frames: a driver value or a look-at key changed since re-open marks its own navigators the same way — the snap on the driver's layer grid, the tick head on its slider, its knob card, and the control snap above them all. See Visual Indicators.

When a key is recorded, the cursor flashes green for a moment — on this grid and on every layer grid on screen at once.

On a dense grid the individual badges disappear and the active snap's frame is drawn on a small dark pill instead, with a crosshair across the grid so you can still see where you are. On a slider whose ticks are closer than about 3 pixels the ticks stop being painted — navigate with the arrows and the anchors instead.

The caption line

Every navigator card carries one grey caption above the widget, in the form Head Knob · Frame 699. It is the always-readable answer to "what frame is this?" even when the dots are too dense to badge.

A card with nothing to say — an empty slot, or a knob that is a pure dimension with no frames of its own — shows no caption at all.

Scope: why a card appears or doesn't

The Navigator re-decides its whole contents on every selection change. It shows a card only when there is genuinely a dimension above you to navigate. When there is not, it says so:

You selected	Navigator shows	Why
An ordinary pose layer	Its control's grid, plus its knob	The normal case.
A global pose layer	Its knob only	"Level 0 — nothing above it. Composes head-less."
A control's own knob	Nothing	"This knob authors its own dimensions. The control's grid adds no axis here — the control already keys through this knob."
A control with a face set	That face's knob	A control does not navigate itself.
A control with no face	Nothing	"This node has no dimension to navigate — only pinned references show here."
A visibility group	Nothing	"Organization node — it doesn't author."
A constraint	Nothing	"Global only — on/off per snap, no grid of its own."
A global look-at or driver	Nothing	"Level 0 — its value is keyed head-less."
A control-scoped look-at	The owning control's grid
A driver scoped to a control	The control's face, plus its knob when used
Nothing at all	Pinned cards only	"Only pinned references — no scope to navigate."

The column grows itself to fit its content when it can, but it will never shrink a pane you dragged bigger.

Pinned navigators

Sometimes you need to see a grid you are not currently authoring — the head's pose while you work on a mouth layer three levels down. That is what pins are for.

To pin: click the pin button in a navigator card's header, or the pin glyph at the right edge of any control / pose layer / knob row in the Outliner. Filled white means pinned.

The rules:

• The head control is pinned by default.
• Pinning also pins the parent chain. Pinning a layer pins its knob and its control. It never pins children.
• Unpinning removes only that node — its ancestors stay pinned until you unpin them too.
• A pinned node that the active scope is already showing does not get a second card.
• There are four pinned slots. Pins beyond the fourth are simply not drawn.

A pinned card is marked view-only: a dashed dimmer border, a muted title. It shows frame numbers but no green keyed dots — green means "the active node's own key", and a reference card has no business claiming that.

You can still navigate on a pinned card: left-click moves the reference cursor, middle-click jumps the timeline. Only authoring — the right-click key menu — is blocked.

A pinned control that has both faces gets a small Front / Back combo. That is a view-only flip of what you are looking at; it never changes which face the control is authoring.

The right-click menu

Right-clicking a snap in the Navigator grid gives you the keying and bulk-clear commands for the whole rig at that position:

Item	Effect
Set Key F6
Remove Key F7
Clear Snap Pose · All Pose Layers	Removes the keyed snap at this position across every pose layer, each at its current snap.
Clear Current Knob Keys · All Pose Layers	Only when a knob is active. Removes every key on the current knob across all layers.
Clear All Keys	Every pose layer, every snap, every knob.
Restore Reference Pose Here	Puts the imported / re-opened reference back over everything the selected position addresses for the selected layer — exactly what its yellow mark covers. Greyed with the reason when there is no reference or nothing diverged. See Visual Indicators.

A slider navigator — what a 1-D control, a knob, or a look-at's bound pose layer gets — carries the same menu. Which shape the navigator takes is a property of the dimension, not a difference in what you can do to it.

Pinned (view-only) cards have no context menu: they navigate, they never author.