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Cel animation

The cel animation feature animates pictures like a flip book.

You can also draw a character animation and a background animation separately and layer them on top of each other.

Basics

The cel animation feature is made up of three elements: cels, tracks, and frames.

Cel
The smallest unit of picture that moves in cel animation.
A cel consists of one or more layers.
You can also stretch a cel so that it spans multiple frames.
Frame
The vertical axis in the figure is a frame. A frame becomes one frame of the animation, and the cels in it are shown stacked.
During playback, frame 1, frame 2, frame 3, and so on are shown at regular intervals.
Track
The horizontal axis in the figure is a track. A track plays the role of a layer in cel animation.
A track has opacity and blend mode settings, which apply to all the cels in the track.
You can view and change a track's settings by double-clicking it or from its context menu.

Basic workflow

  1. Choose Canvas > Enable Cel Animation in the menu bar to enable it.
  2. Once enabled, the Cel Animation panel appears.
  3. Add cels with New Cel and draw on them.
  4. Play the animation with Play / Stop.

Onion skin

Onion skin lets you see the pictures of the previous and next cels through the current one.

Show or hide it with Show Onion Skin in the menu.

Duplicating cels and linked cels

From the menu that appears when you right-click a cel, you can use Duplicate Cels and Duplicate as Linked Cels.

Duplicate Cels
Creates a new cel that is an exact copy of the original. The original and the copy are separate cels.
Duplicate as Linked Cels
Creates a cel identical to the original. Since the original and the copy are the same, editing one also edits the other.
Linked cels have a triangle mark in the upper left. It is normally gray, but it is shown in blue on the current cel and the cels linked to it.

Exporting

Currently, animations can only be exported as an image sequence.