One symbol, every copy in sync. Booleans that finally blend the way they always should have. And a rig that stays where you put it.

Celas Studio 0.10.1: Symbols, Liquid Boolean and Rigging Update

This release spent most of its cycle on three things: symbols, liquid boolean shapes, and rigging. All three needed the attention, and all three should feel noticeably better now.

Symbols that actually stay in sync

The biggest change here is simple to describe and long overdue: one symbol now means one symbol. Whatever you change about it — its artwork, its tag groups, its timeline length and rate, its type and its playback — is stored on the symbol itself and shows up on every copy in the project, however deeply nested, no matter which copy you edited.

Group markers are now full variants. Turn on Variant in Properties and the Variants panel lists them as cards with a real preview, and picking one is a keyframe on the timeline like any other channel. That means a single mechanism now covers a held pose, a running cycle, or switching between them mid-scene.

Symbols also come in two kinds now, the way they do in Flash: a Graphic steps with the timeline it sits on, so it can be scrubbed, while a Movie Clip runs on the main playhead and ignores a parent that's stopped or looping. On top of that, Time Remap lets you keyframe a symbol's own frame to slow it down, freeze it, or run it backwards, complete with its own timeline row, graph curve, and easing.

A long list of bugs around symbols is gone too: hand poses no longer vanish on duplicated symbols or during idle background rendering, undo no longer kicks you out of Edit mode, and renaming a symbol no longer risks merging it into another one that happens to share a name.

Liquid boolean, rebuilt

Boolean liquid shapes got a full rebuild this cycle. Subtract, Intersect, and XOR now blend at the seam the way Union always did, instead of rounding off unrelated corners or ignoring the blend radius past a certain size.

Each part of a boolean group can now carry its own operation, so a single group can union two pieces and subtract a third without needing a nested group for every change. Two new controls, Elasticity and Blend Weight, give you more say over how the blend behaves: how tight or stretched the connection between two shapes is, and how much of the blend any one piece takes on.

The blend itself is also more accurate. Curves are now fit directly from the shapes' own data instead of approximated from sample points, and three or more pieces unioned together blend as a single combined step rather than folding in one at a time — so a piece can no longer nudge a seam it isn't actually touching, just because of where it sits in the layer stack.

And it's faster: liquid boolean blending now computes on the GPU during playback and scrubbing, falling back to the CPU automatically on hardware that can't run it. Scenes with several liquid pieces should keep up with the timeline instead of falling behind it.

Rigging: a lot of small things that add up to a big difference

If you rig characters in Celas Studio, this is the section for you. Dozens of fixes landed across bones, IK, and transforms:

  • Scaling or rotating a rig no longer leaves the bones behind while the artwork bound to them moves correctly
  • Target bones now keep following their parent while you rotate or stretch the parent live, instead of only catching up once you let go
  • IK Strength, Ignored-by-IK, and a bone's own stretch limits now hold while a limb is stretched beyond its reach, not just within it
  • A hand-posed bone stays posed instead of snapping back the moment you release the mouse, whether it's static, animated, or driven by a target
  • Bone dynamics settings (spring, damping, gravity) no longer reset to defaults on reload
  • Welding two nodes together no longer silently detaches whatever was bound to the point that gets absorbed

Scrubbing and playback are also more consistent now: jumping straight to a frame gives the same bone-dynamics result as playing through to it, and a posed rig no longer briefly shows a piece of the character in the wrong place before the correct frame catches up.

Everything else

A handful of smaller but welcome fixes rounds out this release:

  • The vector brush no longer spikes the CPU as a stroke gets longer
  • Selecting or moving a complex shape (hundreds of points, or a fragmented boolean result) no longer stalls the app
  • Depth of field now follows the camera properly and no longer cuts off at a hard edge
  • Camera Depth is continuous and finally does something in the standard, non-3D setup
  • Exporting a heavy scene no longer freezes the window for long stretches
  • Copying shapes now writes real, editable vector data to the system clipboard, so pasting into Illustrator, Inkscape, or Affinity brings across an actual vector object

That's 0.10.1. As always, thanks for reporting bugs and pushing the rigging and boolean tools hard enough to find all of this. Full patch notes are on Steam.