Following an Old Rive Tutorial? Here's Where Everything Moved

If you've ever opened a Rive tutorial and the instructor starts talking about inputs, nested artboards, or listeners, and you have no idea where any of them are on your screen, it's easy to assume you're doing something wrong.

You're not. Most of those features didn't disappear and weren't removed. They simply moved somewhere else.

Rive has changed a lot over the last couple of years, and older tutorials (including some of my own) now show an interface that looks different from the one in front of you. This is a map of the biggest changes, so the next time you follow an older tutorial you'll know exactly where everything lives today.

I'm not going to explain how each feature works in depth here. The goal is simpler: help you find things. For the examples I'm using the Weather Buddy project from my Rive Masterclass, since it touches almost every feature worth talking about.

The biggest change: panels replaced tabs

The largest and most recent shift is the left side of the editor.

In older versions of Rive, your hierarchy, assets, data, and agent each lived inside a tab, and you switched between them one at a time. That whole system is gone. Rive now uses panels, much closer to what you might know from After Effects or Premiere.

Instead of seeing one section at a time, you can keep several panels open side by side. You decide how much space the hierarchy gets, how much the data panel gets, and arrange the editor around the way you work. You can collapse everything down to focus on a single panel, or keep multiple panels visible at once. You can even drag a panel into a new position, so the data panel sits right next to the hierarchy if that's how you like to work.

The trade-off is that you have to manage the space yourself. Open too many panels and the screen gets crowded fast. When that happens, collapse what you don't need and focus on one panel at a time.

Design Mode and Animate Mode now talk to each other

One quiet but genuinely useful change: the panels work across modes.

In older versions, if you wanted to edit a timeline or a state machine, you first switched to Animate Mode and then went hunting for it. Now, if you're in Design Mode and click a timeline or state machine in any panel, Rive switches you into Animate Mode automatically. On a large file, that saves a lot of back-and-forth.

Where the hidden options went: search and the three-dot menus

Two things to know when something seems to be missing.

First, most panels now have a built-in search, which makes finding a specific item in a large file much faster.

Second, a lot of options that used to be visible by default now live inside a three-dot menu. In the Assets panel, that's where you filter asset types. In the Data panel, it's where you choose whether to show the full structure or just the stored values. If you can't find a setting that an older tutorial points to, check the three-dot menu before assuming it's gone. There's a good chance it's just tucked away.

Animate Mode: inputs, listeners, and layers moved

This is where most people get lost following older tutorials, so it's worth slowing down.

Select a state machine. In older versions, inputs and listeners lived in their own panels next to the state machine, always visible. They didn't disappear. Today you'll find them as smaller tabs on the right side of the state machine, collapsed by default. Open them whenever you need them. You can also reach inputs and listeners from inside the state machine in the Animation panel, and there's a search field here too.

Layers moved as well. They used to sit as a row of tabs above the state machine. That row is gone. Layers now live in their own panel that you can show or hide, arranged vertically instead of horizontally, which makes their order much easier to read. (Layer order matters, so this is a real improvement, not just a cosmetic one.)

The old layers area is now a timeline history

So what replaced that old horizontal layers strip?

It's now a history of the timelines you've opened. As you move between timelines and state machines, they collect here automatically, so you can jump back and forth between different parts of the file quickly. You can close them, switch between them, and return to anything you opened earlier. On a larger project it works a lot like tab navigation in Premiere.

Listeners now come with presets

A small change that trips people up: creating a listener used to start you with a blank listener that you configured by hand.

Today, Rive can create a listener with a predefined action already attached. If you're following an older tutorial, choose Blank Listener and you'll get the same starting point as before. If you already know what you want, picking a preset saves you a few clicks.

Timeline controls are visible now, and the Console moved

Open a timeline and you'll notice two changes.

A lot of playback controls that used to be buried in dropdowns are now visible by default: choosing whether the timeline plays as a one-shot, a loop, or ping-pong; the work area for focusing on a section of an animation; and a search field for finding layers inside a busy timeline.

The Console also moved. It used to sit on the right side of the timeline; now it's at the bottom. More importantly, it does more than before. It still shows state machine output, but now that scripting is part of Rive, it can also show output from scripts, so you switch between a State Machine tab and a Script tab depending on what you want to inspect.

Fill and stroke effects moved to the Effects panel

The effects system changed shape, and it's a real upgrade.

In older versions, stroke effects like Trim Path and Dash lived directly inside the stroke options, and you could apply one at a time. Today those options live in the Effects panel, and you're no longer limited to a single effect. You can stack them: Trim Path plus a Dash plus a script that modifies the result, all on the same shape.

The Effects panel is also home to Feather, one of the most useful additions of the last couple of years. Feather softens the edges of shapes, which lets you build blurs, glows, and even vector shadows directly inside Rive. A lot of effects that used to require importing a pre-rendered PNG can now be built in the editor.

Nested Artboards are now Components

If an older tutorial talks about nested artboards and you can't find them, this is why: they're now called Components.

The idea is the same. You design or animate something once and reuse it in multiple places, and updating the original updates every instance. The difference is that you now have to be intentional about what becomes a component. If something isn't marked as a component, you won't be able to reuse it elsewhere, and it won't show up in the Component tool's list. There's a toggle that controls this, and the Component tool (where you add a new one) works much like the old nested-artboard workflow. This shift is also what opened the door to shared libraries and reusable components across files.

Small relocations worth knowing

A handful of features didn't change, they just sit somewhere new:

• Artboard clipping (whether content outside the artboard is hidden) used to be an icon. It's now a checkbox directly on the artboard. Turn it off and you'll see elements that extend past the edges.
• Export is now called Publish. The rename reflects that Rive now publishes more than files: shared libraries and reusable components across projects.
• Invite lets you bring collaborators into a file directly as editors, guests, or view-only users.
• Split stage is new. A selector at the top of the canvas lets you open two or three stages at once and arrange them however you like. It pairs really well with scripting, since you can keep your project on one side and edit or inspect a script on the other.

Some changes happened at the platform level, not in the editor

Not everything that moved is inside the editor. A couple of plan changes catch people off guard.

Importing and exporting files used to be available on the free plan, and isn't anymore. If you're following an older tutorial and can't import or export, you're most likely hitting a plan limitation rather than doing something wrong. That now requires one of Rive's paid plans, including the newer Cadet plan.

It goes the other way too. Free users can now add custom fonts and audio files, which wasn't possible before. So some things moved behind paid plans while others became available to everyone.

The big new features behind all of this

Beyond where things moved, a few genuinely new capabilities are worth knowing by name, because more and more tutorials assume them.

Data binding is, in my opinion, the biggest addition. Inputs used to be the main way to control logic. Data binding lets you connect almost any element to data and view models, and makes it far easier for different parts of a project to talk to each other. That data can drive colors, positions, text, and much more. In the Weather Buddy project, the current weather data drives nearly everything on screen at once. You can also inspect data live while previewing, which is a great way to understand what's actually happening inside a file.

Scripting adds a layer of logic that simply wasn't possible before. The snow in the Weather Buddy scene is generated by a script that creates snowflakes dynamically. Building hundreds of them by hand would be impossible to manage; a script generates them, updates them over time, and reacts to what's happening in the project. Scripting is also becoming the foundation for newer features, including the 3D and shader workflows currently in Early Access. And you don't need to write code to start: the AI agent can generate scripts, shapes, and logic for you, which is what makes scripting far more approachable than it sounds.

Layouts help you build responsive interfaces that adapt to different screen sizes automatically. If you've used Auto Layout in Figma, the concept will feel familiar.

Quick reference: where it moved

Looking for...	In older Rive	In modern Rive
Hierarchy, Assets, Data	Tabs you switched between	Panels, open side by side
Inputs & Listeners	Their own panels by the state machine	Collapsible tabs on the right of the state machine
Layers	A row of tabs above the state machine	Their own vertical panel
Trim Path, Dash	Inside stroke options	The Effects panel (stackable)
Nested Artboards	"Nested Artboard"	"Component" (with a toggle)
Artboard clipping	An icon	A checkbox on the artboard
Export	"Export" button	"Publish" button
State machine / script output	Console on the right	Console at the bottom (State Machine + Script tabs)
Hidden panel options	Visible by default	Inside the three-dot menu

Don't be afraid to explore

If there's one thing to take from all of this, it's that almost nothing in Rive was deleted. It moved.

So when an older tutorial points to something you can't find, try clicking around. Check the three-dot menus, use the search field, and look one panel over from where you expect it. If you're still stuck, the Rive community and a quick search will usually tell you where a feature ended up.

Now go open one of those older tutorials. With this map in hand, it should feel a lot easier to follow.