Rig. Pose. Record.
This is the biggest update yet.
Your art doesn't just play frames anymore — it moves. And it lands on Windows and Linux together.
ARTUS - RIGGING IS COMPLETE
Click your sprite to place a joint. Hold, and a bone grows along the limb. The bone captures the pixels near it — you SEE the capture as a tinted zone with a lime wire frame, and you can reshape it by its handles until it holds exactly the pixels you intend. Drag the bone and only that patch moves.
Anchor a joint (it wears a tiny anchor) and motion turns radially around that point. Pull the hand — the elbow sorts itself out.
Then the part that used to take an animation degree:
Press ANIMATE RIG, drag the end points where they should go.
Press PLAY RIG ANIMATION — the in-between frames draw themselves.
Press RECORD TO FRAMES — the move becomes real, editable, grid-crisp frames, tagged and sitting in your Frames panel, quarter turns pixel-exact.
In a hurry? START FROM A RIG drops a ready-made Arm, Leg, Head, Tentacle or Prop skeleton fitted to your art — and it plays you its move the moment it lands. The arm waves at you. That's the whole feature in one second.
WITH UMBRA: posed limbs cast contact shadows onto the layers beneath in their OWN colors — never a gray smear — sliding with the limb as you pose.
JUICE FORGE — GAME FEEL, AS FRAMES
The flash, the shake, the freeze, the smear — the tricks action games use to make hits FEEL like hits — written straight into your animation as ordinary editable frames. Pick one effect or a ready-made chord (Hit is quiet, Boss Death is the full ceremony). Deterministic, palette-true, and photo sensitivity-checked before you ship.
A TIMELINE, AND AN ENGINE UNDER IT
The Timeline shows every layer track against every frame — linked art marked, tags banded, timing a double-click away, range operations one right-click deep — with a live loop preview that keeps playing while you draw.
Motion Tween walks a selection from here to there — straight or along a bent arc, rotating with the path if you want — and now wears the same corner-and-rotate handles as the Move tool, so the end pose is dragged, not typed.
Palette Cycling rotates a ring of colors — waterfalls, fire, glowing runes — and turns the loop into frames in one click.
TEXT THAT STAYS TEXT
Placed text layers are editable now: double-click the words on the canvas and rewrite them — same size, same spot, same color. Resize a text stamp and it STAYS resized while you try colors. And wording that runs past the canvas edge is never lost: make room and one edit brings every letter back.
MANY SMALL TWEAKS
Erase as a color is live.
The Artus panel slimmed to three verbs and a big live preview — everything else waits under the hood.
Every tooltip in the app is now brand-green with high-contrast text — no more unreadable tooltips over light or dark swatches. Thanks to our first beta tester for the sharp eyes on that one.
Jargon hunted to extinction: every explanation in the app is now plain words — the technical alphabet soup is gone — and a mechanical guard keeps it that way in every future release.
Icons that say what they do: the bent-pipe Bend, the ticked-arc Repeat, the streetlight Auto Shade, and a proper dog bone on the rig.
Brush size grew up: type any size up to your canvas's larger side, slide with fine steps at small sizes, and watch a live true-size dab preview — no more silent cap at 16.
Click any empty canvas to start a new picture. Dead-end clicks now offer to open or create instead of whispering. Undo is one key for everything — a whole rig move, a whole preset drop, a whole recorded clip.