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Tween

Inherits: RefCounted < Object

Lightweight object used for general-purpose animation via script, using Tweeners.

Description

Tweens are mostly useful for animations requiring a numerical property to be interpolated over a range of values. The name tween comes from in-betweening, an animation technique where you specify keyframes and the computer interpolates the frames that appear between them. Animating something with a Tween is called tweening.

Tween is more suited than AnimationPlayer for animations where you don't know the final values in advance. For example, interpolating a dynamically-chosen camera zoom value is best done with a Tween; it would be difficult to do the same thing with an AnimationPlayer node. Tweens are also more light-weight than AnimationPlayer, so they are very much suited for simple animations or general tasks that don't require visual tweaking provided by the editor. They can be used in a fire-and-forget manner for some logic that normally would be done by code. You can e.g. make something shoot periodically by using a looped CallbackTweener with a delay.

A Tween can be created by using either SceneTree.create_tween or Node.create_tween. Tweens created manually (i.e. by using Tween.new()) are invalid and can't be used for tweening values.

A tween animation is created by adding Tweeners to the Tween object, using tween_property, tween_interval, tween_callback or tween_method:

GDScriptC#

var tween = get_tree().create_tween()
tween.tween_property($Sprite, "modulate", Color.RED, 1)
tween.tween_property($Sprite, "scale", Vector2(), 1)
tween.tween_callback($Sprite.queue_free)

This sequence will make the $Sprite node turn red, then shrink, before finally calling Node.queue_free to free the sprite. Tweeners are executed one after another by default. This behavior can be changed using parallel and set_parallel.

When a Tweener is created with one of the tween_* methods, a chained method call can be used to tweak the properties of this Tweener. For example, if you want to set a different transition type in the above example, you can use set_trans:

GDScriptC#

var tween = get_tree().create_tween()
tween.tween_property($Sprite, "modulate", Color.RED, 1).set_trans(Tween.TRANS_SINE)
tween.tween_property($Sprite, "scale", Vector2(), 1).set_trans(Tween.TRANS_BOUNCE)
tween.tween_callback($Sprite.queue_free)

Most of the Tween methods can be chained this way too. In the following example the Tween is bound to the running script's node and a default transition is set for its Tweeners:

GDScriptC#

var tween = get_tree().create_tween().bind_node(self).set_trans(Tween.TRANS_ELASTIC)
tween.tween_property($Sprite, "modulate", Color.RED, 1)
tween.tween_property($Sprite, "scale", Vector2(), 1)
tween.tween_callback($Sprite.