Your first project, start to finish

A complete first loop through Celas Studio: create a project, draw something, animate it, scrub and play it back, then export it.

This page is one path through the whole app, start to finish: make a project, draw a shape, give it two poses, watch it move, and export the result. Nothing here is the only way to do it. It is the shortest way, so the pieces make sense before you branch out into the pages that cover each of them properly.

Fifteen minutes gets you a project with a moving shape and a file on disk. Do it once before reading anything else in this manual.

Create a project#

1. Open Celas Studio. The Home window appears on top of the workspace, on the Recent tab if you have opened anything before, or on New Project if you have not.
2. Click the New Project tab if it is not already showing.
3. Leave the settings column at its defaults (1920 x 1080, 24 FPS, 25 Frames) or type your own values. Typing in Width or Height clears any template you had selected.
4. Click Create at the bottom of the settings column.

The project opens in Edit mode, on frame 0: the construction frame, where you build and fix artwork rather than animate it.

Draw something#

1. In the Tools panel down the left edge, pick a shape tool. The five shape tools share one slot; press Shift+U to cycle through Rectangle, Ellipse, Polygon and Star if the one you want is not showing.
2. Drag on the canvas to draw it. Hold Shift while you drag to constrain a rectangle to a square or an ellipse to a circle.
3. Let go of the mouse. The shape is now selected, with its own fill and stroke.

Switch to Animate mode#

Press Tab. The button at the left of the transport bar changes from blue Edit Mode to green Animate Mode, the Timeline fills in with tracks, and the playhead jumps to the frame you were last animating on, frame 1, the first time through.

Turn on Auto Key in the Timeline header. With it on, moving, rotating or scaling the shape writes a keyframe for you; by default Auto Key is armed for Position, Rotation and Scale.

Set two poses#

1. With the playhead on frame 1, drag the shape a little with the Move or Transform tool. A keyframe diamond appears on its row in the Timeline.
2. Drag the playhead further along the Timeline ruler, to frame 12, say.
3. Drag the shape somewhere else. A second diamond appears on the same row.

Between those two frames Celas Studio works out the in-between positions for you. That is the whole idea: you pose the extremes, and the software tweens what is between them.

Scrub and play#

Drag the playhead back and forth across the two keyframes to check the motion by eye: this is scrubbing, and it works at any point on the Timeline ruler.

Press Space to play. The shape travels between your two poses and loops back to the start of the project. Press Space again to stop.

Export it#

1. Choose File ▸ Export ▸ Animated GIF…
2. Click Browse and pick a folder and a file name. Celas Studio appends .gif for you.
3. Leave Resolution, Frame rate, Loop and the rest at their defaults: Start and End already cover the whole project.
4. Click Export.

A small Exporting… window tracks the frames and closes on its own when the file is written. There is no success message and no button to open the folder: when the progress window is gone, the GIF is there.

Where this leaves you#

You have now touched every layer of the app once: a document, artwork, a mode switch, keyframes, playback and a rendered file. How animation works goes back over the model behind Edit and Animate mode in more depth, and The Tools panel maps everything else you can pick up from that strip.