This is the update where Celas Studio stops growing sideways and starts getting ready for 1.0. Around ninety new features and improvements land at once, together with more than 460 fixes. From here on, every update until 1.0 is about fixes and polish.

The last feature update before 1.0

Celas Studio 0.12.0 is out, and it marks a turning point. This is the last update that brings big new features before version 1.0. From now until 1.0, our work goes into fixes, stability and polish, so the tools you already use become as solid as they can be. Once 1.0 is out, new features start coming again.

That makes your reports more valuable than ever. If something breaks, behaves oddly or just feels wrong, tell us and a hotfix will follow.

Rigs that bind themselves

Rigging takes the biggest step in this release. Until now, artwork had to be bound to bones by hand before it would move with them. In 0.12.0, layers you place inside a bone layer follow its bones on their own. Each point moves with the bones near it, blended by each bone's Weight Area, so a character can be posed seconds after the bones are drawn.

A new Binding setting on the bone layer lets you decide how this works:

  • Flexible: every bone moves the artwork around it.
  • Region: a bone moves only what lies inside its Weight Area.
  • Manual: only bound points and linked layers move, exactly as before, so older rigs keep working untouched.

Around that, a set of tools that make rigs easier to animate:

  • Bone lock: a locked bone stays where it is while its parents bend to keep it there. A planted foot stays planted while the body moves, and the lock can be keyed on and off.
  • Branch Switch: a bone's child branches can become alternatives, with one shown at a time. Swap a hand pose or a head turn with a single key.
  • Shy bones: hide finished parts of a rig from the canvas with View ▸ Hide Shy Bones (Ctrl+Shift+B).
  • Bone motion paths: the Bone tool shows the path of the selected bone. Drag a key on it to re-pose the bone, and bend a handle bone's path with bezier handles.
  • Actions drive bone settings: IK strength, the lock, the Branch Switch branch and dynamics can all be driven by an action.

Your references, inside your project

The new References panel keeps reference pictures and videos in tabs inside your project file, so they travel with it. Paste, drop or import them, then show any of them on the canvas, over or behind your artwork, with its own opacity.

Video references get their own player: step frame by frame, play on 1s, 2s or 3s, loop, and scrub on a ruler that keeps its own time, separate from your timeline. A clip shown on the canvas keeps playing even with the panel closed.

Two small tools round it out. Colors to Swatches turns a colour design sheet, a drawing or a photo into a new swatch category, and a black and white view in the Navigator (Ctrl+Shift+Y) lets you check your values at a glance.

A full toolbox for raster and pixel work

Painted and pixel layers got the tools they were missing:

  • The Transform tool now has Skew, Perspective, Distort and Warp, on a selection or on a whole layer, and the result can be keyframed.
  • A new Pixel menu brings adjustments and filters (Levels, Curves, Hue/Saturation, Gaussian Blur, Unsharp Mask, Pixelate and more, all with a live preview), selection commands, Merge Down, Merge Visible to New Layer and Trim Layer.
  • The Smudge tool gains Blur, Sharpen, Dodge, Burn and Clone modes.
  • The Marquee and Magic Wand are smarter: fixed ratio and fixed size, a Selection Brush, Contiguous and All Layers options, and Ctrl or Ctrl+Alt drags that move the pixels or a copy of them.
  • In Pixel Mode, every selection snaps to whole pixels of the grid.

Video that opens instantly

Video used to be decoded up front and kept in a disk cache. Not any more. In 0.12.0 a clip opens at once, whatever its length or size, and frames are decoded as they play. Memory stays the same for a ten second clip and a two hour one, and nothing is written to disk, so the video cache setting is gone.

Audio got friendlier too. Audio and video layers have Mute and Solo buttons on their waveform row, and Audio Scrubbing plays the sound under the playhead while you drag or step through frames, so finding a syllable or a beat by ear is easy.

Lighter, and faster

Interface Brightness and Interface Contrast in Preferences take the whole interface from the dark theme through mid grey to light grey. Panels, text, icons, the timeline and the brush cards all follow live while you drag the slider.

Under the hood, much more of the canvas is now drawn by the graphics card. Playback is smoother, panning and zooming stay fluid in heavy scenes, large blurs and glows draw many times faster, there is less delay between your pen and the ink on screen, and the undo history takes far less memory.

Pen and brushes

  • Pen pressure calibration and a pressure curve in Preferences ▸ Pen, with a live graph of your pen.
  • Moving grain drags the brush texture into streaks, like dry brush or chalk pulled over paper.
  • Barrel rotation turns the brush tip as you roll the pen, on pens that report it.
  • The vector Pencil follows pen pressure.
  • Line Boil and Brush Boil can boil only while the drawing moves, so a held pose stays calm.

Meet King Cat

There is a new sample project on the Home screen: King Cat, the grumpy, crowned cat from our cover. Open it to see how shapes, masks and shading are put together, or use it as a playground for the new tools.

More than 460 fixes

This release also closes a long list of problems. A few highlights:

  • When Windows logs off, shuts down or restarts for an update, every document with unsaved work now gets a recovery copy, offered back at the next launch.
  • Many ways the app could close have been fixed, from damaged media to missing folders and low disk space.
  • The Eraser works on animated drawings, on every key.
  • The Fill bucket fills spaces closed by pencil and pen lines and closes T-shaped gaps.
  • Work inside actions and symbols no longer loses keys, poses or edits.
  • With several layers selected, the transform box stays around them, and layer effects apply to all of them.

The full list of changes is in the release notes on Steam.

Thank you

Every report and project file you sent shaped this release. Please keep them coming at support@celas.studio, or tell us on Discord. On the way to 1.0, they matter more than ever.