Exporting
The five things Celas Studio can render your project into, the rig data it can export for game engines, the settings they share, and how to watch or stop a render.
Everything Celas Studio renders out lives under File ▸ Export. There are five render destinations, a single image, a PNG sequence, a sprite sheet, an animated GIF and a video file, and each opens its own dialog. A sixth item, Skeleton (JSON)…, writes a rig and its animation as data for a game engine rather than rendering pictures. The whole submenu is greyed out until a project is open, and none of the items has a keyboard shortcut.
Only one export runs at a time. While a render is going the Export items do nothing, so let it finish or cancel it first. There is no need to leave a symbol or an action first: an export started inside one renders the whole scene as it plays, and the symbol or action is still open afterwards.
Which format should I pick
| Menu item | What it writes | Pick it for |
|---|---|---|
| Image… | One still: PNG, JPEG, WebP or BMP | A poster frame, an illustration, a thumbnail |
| PNG Sequence… | One numbered file per frame, into a folder | Handing frames to a compositor or an editor |
| Sprite Sheet… | Every frame packed into one image, with a JSON file describing the frames | Game engines and web animation |
| Animated GIF… | A looping GIF, 2 to 256 colours | Quick previews, chat, forums |
| Video (MP4/WebM)… | MP4, MOV, animated WebP or WebM | Delivery: the only route that carries audio, and the only one that carries moving transparency |
| Skeleton (JSON)… | Bones, meshes and animations as data, plus the images they use | A bone rig played back by a game engine |
Exporting an image sequence, a sprite sheet, a GIF or a QuickTime .mov uses all of your processor cores, so it is several times faster than it used to be, and the files are identical to before. The window stays responsive during a heavy export, so Cancel and the progress bar always answer.
The rows every dialog shares
- Output and Browse: the path box is read-only, so the destination has to come from Browse. The Export button stays disabled until you have picked one.
- Resolution: Width and Height, re-seeded from the canvas every time the dialog opens. The chain-link Lock aspect button keeps the ratio; the ratio is captured the moment you engage the lock, not recalculated as you type.
- Background: Canvas colour, Black or White, with Transparent only where the format can store it. The image, PNG sequence and sprite sheet dialogs add two chroma key colours, Magenta and Green, for keying the art out later in another program.
- Viewport view: burns the on-canvas editing overlay into the frames: bones, the transform gizmo, node and pen handles, gradient handles and the mesh cage. Off by default.
- Start and End: the frame range, starting from the project's in and out points. The single-image dialog has a Frame field instead.
- Pixel Mode: on by default for a project that is in Pixel Mode, so the crisp grid reaches the file. Turn it off to export the smooth vector picture instead.
Viewport view is one setting shared by all five dialogs, so turning it on for a GIF also turns it on for the next video. It exports what the viewport is showing at that moment, which makes it useful for a rig walkthrough and wrong for anything else.
What gets rendered
Each frame is rendered fresh through the scene camera at the resolution you set, with editing gizmos hidden. The timeline is evaluated at that frame first, so what lands in the file is what the canvas would show there. That now includes the camera: its moves and its zoom reach the exported file, where they used to be left out.
Exporting does not disturb your project. The current frame and the mode you were in are put back when the render ends, whether it finished or you stopped it.
Progress and cancelling
Everything except the single image renders inside its own export window, which stays open while it works. The settings lock, the preview shows each frame as it is written, and the footer holds a progress bar reading Frame n / n. After the first few frames, the time left is added, as in Frame 40 / 120 · 0:12 left. Cancel sits beside it. Frames are rendered in batches, and the window repaints as soon as a batch has taken about the time of one screen refresh, so it never looks frozen, even on a slow scene. A single image is written in one shot, with no progress at all.
Cancel stops at the end of the current batch and leaves the window open, reading Export cancelled. What it leaves behind on disk depends on the destination.
| Destination | After Cancel |
|---|---|
| Video | The partial file is deleted |
| Animated GIF | The partial file is deleted |
| Sprite sheet | Nothing is written: the sheet is assembled in memory and only saved at the end |
| PNG sequence | The frames already written stay in the folder |
When the export finishes, the footer reads Export complete, with a Show in Folder button that opens your file manager at the file, or at the folder for a PNG sequence. If the encoder or the disk fails part-way, it reads Export failed instead. Either way, the Cancel button has become Close: click it to close the window.
An export keeps rendering the document it was started on while you work in another tab. Closing that document ends the export as cancelled.
What the dialogs remember
Format, Quality, Background, the sprite sheet's Columns and Spacing, the GIF's Colours, Dither and Loop, and the video overlay settings all carry over to your next session. Resolutions, frame ranges and output paths do not. They are re-seeded from the project each time you open a dialog.