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Introduction

What Celas Studio is, what you can make with it, and how to find your way around this manual.

Celas Studio is a 2D animation application for illustrators and animators. Vector shapes, painted raster cells, bone rigs, a keyframe timeline and a camera all live inside one project file, so a drawing, its rig and its animation never have to leave the app.

This manual describes the Early Access release. Every page is written against the app as it actually behaves today: defaults, ranges and keys are the ones in the build, not the ones on a roadmap.

The Celas Studio workspace with a rigged character on the canvas and the Layers, Color, Timeline and Properties panels docked around it.

What you can make

  • A single illustration, exported as PNG, JPEG, WebP or BMP
  • An animation, exported as MP4, MOV, WebM or animated WebP
  • An animated GIF, a PNG sequence, or a sprite sheet for a game engine
  • Pixel art, on a canvas that snaps every mark to a pixel grid
  • A rigged character, posed with bones, weights and mesh deform
  • Frame-by-frame animation, drawn cell by cell on the timeline

One canvas, two kinds of artwork

A Shape layer holds editable Bezier paths with a fill and a stroke. A Raster layer holds pixels you paint with brushes, and can carry a different drawing on every frame. Both stack in the same Layers panel, both sit under the same bones, and both export through the same renderer.

Everything composites in 2D. The camera can push layers apart in depth for a multiplane move, but there is no 3D modelling stage and no 3D geometry to manage.

How this manual is organised

Nine sections, in the order most people need them. Getting started covers installation, the launcher, the interface and your first animation. Projects & files is about saving, opening and importing. Tools, Drawing & painting and Layers cover making artwork; Rigging and Animation cover making it move; Output covers export and sharing.

Reference collects the tables you come back to: every keyboard shortcut, every menu item, every tool option, and where the app keeps its settings on disk.

New to this kind of software? Read Getting started straight through, then First animation. After that, jump to whatever the work in front of you needs.

Conventions used here

  • Menu paths are written File ▸ Export ▸ Animated GIF… , with the same wording and capitalisation the app uses.
  • Panel, tool and button names appear exactly as they are labelled on screen, so Color is spelt the way the app spells it even where the prose says colour.
  • Shortcuts are given for Windows and Linux. On macOS, use Command wherever a page says Ctrl, unless the page says otherwise.
  • Defaults, ranges and units are stated whenever a control has them.

About Early Access

Celas Studio is an Early Access build. Help ▸ About shows the version with an Early Access tag and the same warning: features are in active development and may change before the 1.0 release.

In practice that means a few things for you. Some panels and options will move or be renamed. A handful of features behave differently on Windows and macOS, and each page says so where it matters. And because the app has no built-in updater, new builds reach you through Steam, the only place Celas Studio is sold.

Keep your own backups of work you care about during Early Access. Auto-Save is off by default: turn it on in Preferences, and Celas Studio will offer to restore its recovery copies after a crash.