The Home window

The launcher you land on: recent projects with their thumbnails, the template list, and the settings a new project starts from.

Home opens on top of the workspace when you start Celas Studio, and you can bring it back at any time from File ▸ Home. It has two tabs (Recent and New Project) plus an Open… button and an account button along the top.

While Home is open, the panels behind it are inactive. Close it with the × at the top right, or by creating or opening a project. Drag the strip along the top to move the window.

Recent projects#

The Recent tab shows a grid of cards, one per project you have opened or saved. Each card shows the preview picture stored inside the project file, then the file name and the folder it lives in. Until a project has been saved once it has no preview, and the card shows a plain white rectangle.

Click a card to open that project. A file that has been moved or deleted is drawn with its name in dull red and will not open: clicking it says the file could not be found and may have been moved, renamed or deleted, and the card stays until you remove it. A file that is still there but cannot be read says so differently, that it may be damaged or written by a newer version of Celas Studio, and it is not added back to the list.

Hover a card and a small × appears in its top corner. That removes the project from the list and nothing else: the file on disk is untouched. The list holds the sixteen most recent projects and drops the oldest as new ones arrive.

Templates#

The New Project tab lists templates in four categories. Clicking one fills in the canvas size for you; it does not touch the frame rate or the frame count, so set those in the column on the right.

The three theatrical entries name the projection ratio, not a product: Flat is 1.85:1 (1998 x 1080), the ratio most feature animation is finished in; Wide is European widescreen, 1.66:1 (1800 x 1080); Scope is the anamorphic 2.39:1 (2048 x 858).

The pixel-art templates come in two flavours. Icon, Sprite, Tile and Scene use a Pixel Size of 1, so one art pixel is one canvas pixel. The HD and UHD entries keep the same art resolution but give each art pixel a block of 4 or 8 canvas pixels, which exports at a larger size without softening the edges.

The settings column#

Everything a new project needs is in the column headed SETTINGS. Typing in Width or Height clears the template highlight, since the canvas no longer matches it.

Orientation sits at the top of the column because it decides what Width and Height mean. Templates are stored landscape; choosing Portrait turns every one of them round, so Full HD 1080p becomes 1080 x 1920 and the card shows that size before you click it. Square templates are unaffected. Flipping the toggle also swaps the canvas you have already set, including one you typed by hand. The choice is not remembered: Home opens on Landscape every launch.

Under the fields, a Duration line converts Frames and FPS into seconds as you type. Frames is the number of frames you can animate on: the project also holds frame 0, the construction frame, which is where you build and edit artwork rather than animate it.

Press Create at the bottom of the column to make the project. If the tab you are on is still untitled and has no unsaved changes, it is reused; otherwise the new project opens in a new tab.

Open… and the account button#

Open… sits to the right of the two tabs. It closes Home and opens the file browser, which accepts Celas Studio projects (.cls) and SVG drawings.

At the far right is the account button. Signed out it reads Account and opens the sign-in dialog; signed in it shows your account name and opens the Account dialog. Either way Home closes first.

Show at startup#

The switch in the footer decides whether Home appears when the app starts. It is on by default, and the setting is remembered between sessions. With it off, Celas Studio starts on an empty workspace, where the viewport offers three cards (Home, New Project and Open…) so the launcher is still one click away.