Shading flat colour has always meant painting shadows by hand, shape by shape. Light layers change that: soft-edged light and shadow shapes that sit over your colours, with one panel to set the mood of the whole scene. Around them, the brush gets every blend mode, the fill bucket moves to the graphics card, and boolean shapes learn to count strokes.

Light layers

A light layer holds soft-edged shapes of light and shadow that sit over flat-coloured artwork. Every vertex has a feather point that marks where its soft edge ends. It moves freely in the Node tool and has its own bezier handles, so an edge can be crisp on one side of a shadow and melt away on the other.

One light layer can hold several paths, and each has:

  • A kind: Shadow, Rim Light, Ambient Occlusion and more, each with a blend mode that suits it.
  • A combine mode: Add, Subtract, Intersect or XOR, live, from the Properties path list or the pathfinder buttons. The paths are never cut, so you can change your mind at any time.

Lights stay inside their parent when that layer has Clipping Mask on, so a shadow never spills off a sleeve. They can be bound to bones and follow the rig, and they are drawn on the graphics card. Any Shape layer can be converted to a Light layer.

The new Light panel has two tabs. Layer lists the paths of the selected light layer with their kind, combine mode and feather, and adds circle and square paths. Global sets the colour, strength and visibility of each light kind for the whole document. Turn every shadow a little bluer for a night scene, or the rim light warmer for a sunset, in one move. A light layer can follow these global settings or keep a colour of its own.

To work inside a light layer, double-click it with the Move tool, then click and drag its paths. Double-click outside or press Esc to come back out.

Every blend mode for the brush

The brush now offers the full set of blend modes, in the order you know from other painting apps: from Darken, Multiply and the Burns, through Lighten, Screen and the Dodges, Overlay and the Lights, to Difference, Subtract, Divide, Hue, Saturation, Color and Luminosity. Dissolve, Behind and Clear are there too.

All of them are computed on the graphics card, also in Pixel Mode and for watercolor, and the blend mode can be picked straight from the Brush tool options bar.

A fill bucket on the graphics card

The fill bucket now runs entirely on the GPU. Reading the artwork, finding the region with gap closing, narrow areas, expand and shrink and the soft edge, and laying the colour down all happen there. A bitmap fill offers the same blend modes as the brush, so you can fill a shadow area in Multiply in one click.

Boolean shapes count their strokes

Boolean shapes used to blend only the fills of their shapes. Now every shape's stroke becomes part of the boolean shape at its own width, and a stroke whose width changes from vertex to vertex keeps its thick and thin parts. An open path counts as its stroke alone, so a single brushy line can melt into a body.

The result is one shape painted with the bottom shape's fill, or with its stroke colour when it has no fill, and the bottom shape's stroke, plain, brush or dashed, is drawn around the whole outline.

Boolean shapes saved earlier whose shapes have strokes will look different in this version.

Onion skin on keys

Snap to Keys in the onion skin settings puts the ghosts on keyframes instead of on nearby frames. It can count keys on every layer or only on the selected ones, and the timeline outlines the frames the ghosts land on, so you always see the poses that matter.

Less work for the same picture

The canvas now reuses what it has already drawn instead of drawing it again:

  • Layer effects are kept between frames while their layer does not change, and are worked out only around the layer instead of over the whole canvas.
  • Motion blur is drawn from one picture of the layer moved along its path wherever that matches the motion, and it draws several times faster than before.
  • Each onion skin ghost frame is drawn once.
  • Bone deformation runs on all CPU cores and no longer slows down with every layer added.

Exports still compute every frame in full, so what you export is always exact.

On a computer without a supported graphics card or driver, Celas Studio now explains at launch, in your language, that a GPU is part of the minimum system requirements, instead of closing without a word.

Smaller things

  • The Layers panel has a type filter: ticked layer types show as usual and the others shrink to thin bars, so the tree keeps its shape.
  • The Node tool has an Auto Select switch with a layer kind, and Ctrl/Cmd + double-click on a vertex selects its whole path.

Fixes

A few of the fixes in this release:

  • A layer turned in 3D inside a group shows its motion blur on the canvas.
  • Gradient fills and strokes stretch and turn with their shape, and the canvas and exports agree.
  • Menus near the bottom of the screen no longer open behind the taskbar or the Dock.
  • Documents with very deeply nested layers no longer crash, and documents with very many shapes no longer keep using more memory.
  • Node edits on scaled or rotated layers no longer shift the layer.
  • Saved workspaces can be deleted again.

The full list is in the release notes on Steam.

Thank you

Every report and project file you send shapes the next release. Please keep them coming at support@celas.studio, or tell us on Discord.