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Creating custom animations for your NX themes

Written by Capybara, revisioned by Migush. Last updated: June 2023

Info

While this guide provides a fair amount of information about animations, there is always room for additional resource as things still aren't fully documented. Feel free to contribute either by submitting a pull request on github or by simply reaching out to the Themezer Discord.

Introduction

In this tutorial, we'll see how to implement custom animations to NX themes. This isn't a trivial topic and I expect you to have minimum knowledge on how the console's UI is organized, how layouts work and how to use Switch Theme Injector. All the basics should be covered in LayoutDocs' previous sections.

We can distinguish two "main" types of animations:

  • Animations made using the 3 basic transformations: translation (linear displacement), scaling and rotation. It sounds rather minimalistic but, in fact, you achieve pretty much anything with these, in the end it's up to your own creativity.
  • Color based animations, which also include transparency.

There are some more types but for the sake of pedagogy, I'll elaborate on the animation creation process by going through one easy example. In case you want to expand your possibilities, additional documentation and tables with the values you'll be needing will be provided later on in this tutorial, so you can try them out by yourself.

You can have a glance at my Themezer profile for examples. If you want to witness theming at its maximum potential, you might want to check NSX's work out. Most of his themes still work on firmware 15.x (it also should on 16.x), but some might glitch, and they likely won't be updated since NSX is sadly not active in the scene anymore.

Mod AnimNX theme Unison R theme
Mod AnimNX by NSX Unison R by me
The cursor changes its shape in a looping animation, growing animation on game & applet icons on hover, among other features Unlocking the console into the home screen triggers a zoom out+fade in animation, drop down animation for game titles, color changing buttons on hover, among other features

Requirements

Make sure you download the latest version for each aforementioned software.

Guide structure

Here is the general structure of this guide:

  • Introduction part: introducing animations and quick refresher course on Nintendo Switch files

  • Main tutorial: animation creation process

  • Extras:

    • Animation templates: speeding up the process, making color based animations
    • More on animations: additional notes, looping animations, animated backgrounds
    • Tables: to experiment further and expand animation possibilities

Continue to Animations: refresher course

Special thanks

  • exelix and Migush for all the tips
  • Zhi for the animated background testing part
  • All the contributors from the Nintendo Switch modding scene

Additional guides

Check out these guides for more info on how to create animations: