Animation Playback

⚠️ DEPRECATED: Use State Machines instead of direct animation playback at runtime

DEPRECATION NOTICE: This entire page documents the legacy Animation Playback system. For new projects: Use State Machines instead. For existing projects: Plan to migrate from direct animation control to State Machines as soon as possible. This content is provided for legacy support only.

Rive lets you specify what animations and state machines to mix and play and control the play/pause state of each animation.

The term animations may collectively refer to both animations and state machines. In this section, we explore how to deal with specific animation playback, rather than state machines.

If you are trying to coordinate multiple animations’ playback at runtime, consider using a state machine instead to do this for you!

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Choosing starting animations

Starting animations can also be chosen when Rive is instantiated. The first animation on the artboard may play if one is not provided, or a state machine is not set.

New Runtime (Recommended)

The new runtime only supports state machine playback, and not direct animation playback.

Legacy Runtime

Currently, with the React Native runtime, you can set one animation to autoplay at the start. Despite this, see below in the playback sections to see how you can mix multiple animations on playback functions.

export default function App() {
  return (
    <View>
      <Rive
        resourceName="truck_v7"
        artboardName="Jeep"
        autoplay
        animationName="idle"
      />
    </View>
  );
}

​

Controlling playback

Playback of each animation and state machine can be separately controlled. You can play and pause playback using the play , pause and stop methods, either passing in the names of the animations you want to affect or passing in nothing which will affect all instanced animations.

New Runtime (Recommended)

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Invoking Playback Controls

The new runtime uses the useRive hook to access the Rive instance for controlling playback: play and pause.

export default function PlaybackExample() {
  const { riveViewRef, setHybridRef } = useRive();
  const { riveFile } = useRiveFile(require('../../assets/rive/rewards.riv'));

  const play = () => {
    riveViewRef?.play();
  };

  const pause = () => {
    riveViewRef?.pause();
  };

  return (
    <View style={styles.container}>
      <View style={styles.riveContainer}>
        {riveFile ? (
          <RiveView
            file={riveFile}
            hybridRef={setHybridRef}
            autoPlay={true} // Automatically starts the state machine
            style={styles.rive}
          />
        ) : null}
      </View>
      <Button onPress={play} title="Play" />
      <Button onPress={pause} title="Pause" />
    </View>
  );
}

Legacy Runtime

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Invoking Playback Controls

To trigger animation playback controls, set a ref on the Rive component rendered. Once the ref is populated, you can trigger functions such as play, pause, etc. See the ref method docs for React Native Rive Ref Methods.

import Rive, { RiveRef } from 'rive-react-native'

export default function App() {
  const riveRef = React.useRef<RiveRef>(null);

  const handlePlayPress = () => {
    riveRef?.current?.play();
  };

  const handlePausePress = () => {
    riveRef?.current?.pause();
  };

  return (
    <View>
      <Rive
        resourceName="truck_v7"
        animationName="idle"
        ref={riveRef}
      />
      <Button onPress={handlePlayPress} title="play" />
      <Button onPress={handlePausePress} title="pause" />
    </View>
  );
}