Celas Studio 0.12.0 is out, and it is a milestone: this is the last feature update before version 1.0. It brings around ninety new features and improvements and more than four hundred and sixty fixes.

From here until 1.0, updates will be about fixes and polish. If something breaks or feels wrong, tell us and a hotfix will follow. After 1.0, new features will start coming again.

Rigging takes the biggest step. Layers placed inside a bone layer now follow its bones by themselves, with no binding needed, and a new Binding setting chooses how much each bone moves. Bones can be locked in place, so a planted foot stays put while the body moves. Branch Switch turns a bone's child branches into alternatives you can key, and Shy bones keep a finished rig out of the way. The Bone tool shows motion paths you can edit directly, and actions can now drive IK, locks, branches and dynamics.

The new References panel keeps reference pictures and videos inside your project. Show one on the canvas over or behind your artwork, play a video reference frame by frame on its own clock, turn a colour sheet into swatches, and check your values in black and white.

Raster and pixel work got a full toolbox: Skew, Perspective, Distort and Warp in the Transform tool, a Pixel menu with adjustments, filters, selection commands and Merge Down, Blur, Sharpen, Dodge, Burn and Clone in the Smudge tool, and a smarter Marquee and Magic Wand.

Video now opens at once, whatever its length: frames are decoded as they play, memory stays the same for a short clip and a long one, and nothing is written to disk. Audio layers have Mute and Solo, and Audio Scrubbing lets you hear the frame under the playhead.

Much more of the canvas is now drawn by the graphics card, so playback, panning and zooming are smoother, and the interface can be set anywhere from the dark theme to light grey.

Thank you to everyone who sent reports and project files. Please keep them coming at [email protected], they matter more than ever on the way to 1.0.

New and improved

Rigging and animation

• Layers inside a bone layer follow its bones by themselves, blended by each bone's Weight Area. A new Binding setting chooses Flexible, Region or Manual, and rigs made before keep working as they were.
• A layer inside a rig can be limited to selected bones, and pictures inside a rig bend with its bones.
• Bones can be locked: a locked bone stays in place while its parents bend to keep it there. The lock can be keyed.
• Branch Switch: a bone's child branches become alternatives, one shown at a time, picked and keyed in Properties.
• Shy bones, hidden from the canvas with View > Hide Shy Bones (Ctrl+Shift+B).
• The Bone tool shows the selected bone's motion path: drag its keys to re-pose the bone, and bend a handle bone's path.
• Actions can drive bone settings: IK strength, the lock, the Branch Switch branch and dynamics.
• Loop Group works on bones, on fill, stroke, effect and setting rows, on 3D rotation, on the camera and on draw order.
• Follow Path has Elasticity: a layer bends along the path it travels, like a snake lying in every curve.
• Motion blur switched on for a layer also blurs every layer inside it.
• Onion skin markers can be pinned to a frame, so that ghost stays in view wherever the playhead goes.

Symbols

• Every placed symbol has its own Playback, First Frame and Last Frame, with new Play Once Reverse and Loop Reverse.
• Swap Symbol, Duplicate Symbol and Break Apart (Ctrl+B), which keeps every frame looking the same.
• Convert to Symbol and Paste ask before cutting a layer off from the path or bone it is linked with.

References and colour

• A new References panel keeps pictures and videos in tabs inside your project. Show one on the canvas over or behind your artwork, with its own opacity.
• Video references play on their own clock, frame by frame, on 1s, 2s or 3s, and keep playing on the canvas with the panel closed.
• Colors to Swatches turns a colour design sheet, a drawing or a photo into a new swatch category.
• A black and white view in the Navigator (Ctrl+Shift+Y) for checking values.

Raster and pixel tools

• The Transform tool has Skew, Perspective, Distort and Warp modes, on selected pixels or on a whole layer, with keyframes.
• Pixel > Adjustments and Pixel > Filters: Levels, Curves, Hue/Saturation, Gaussian Blur, Unsharp Mask, Pixelate and more, with a live preview.
• New selection commands: Selection from Layer, Border, Smooth, Fill and Stroke Selection, Crop Canvas to Selection and Selection to Shape.
• Merge Down, Merge Visible to New Layer, Trim Layer and Transform Pixels in the Pixel menu.
• The Smudge tool has Blur, Sharpen, Dodge, Burn and Clone modes.
• The Marquee draws squares, circles and fixed sizes, moves its outline from inside in every mode, and has a Selection Brush. Ctrl+drag moves the pixels, Ctrl+Alt+drag moves a copy.
• The Magic Wand has Contiguous, All Layers and Anti-alias, and the Eyedropper can average an area.
• Copy, Cut and Paste work on selected pixels, and pasted pixels float in place ready to move.
• In Pixel Mode every selection snaps to whole pixels of the grid.

Brushes and pen

• Pen pressure calibration and a pressure curve in Preferences > Pen.
• Moving grain drags the brush texture into streaks, like dry brush or chalk.
• Barrel rotation turns the brush tip as you roll the pen, on pens that report it.
• The vector Pencil follows pen pressure.
• Line Boil and Brush Boil can boil only while the drawing moves.
• The Brush and Pencil bars carry the fill and stroke colours.

Video and audio

• Video opens at once, whatever its length or size, and plays without filling memory or disk. The video cache is gone.
• Audio and video layers have Mute and Solo buttons on their waveform row.
• Audio Scrubbing plays the sound under the playhead while you drag or step through frames.

Interface and speed

• Interface Brightness and Interface Contrast take the whole interface from the dark theme to light grey.
• Slimmer tool bar and Timeline bars, and tighter corners on buttons and fields.
• Export windows show each frame as it is written, with progress, time left and Show in Folder.
• Much more of the canvas is drawn by the graphics card, playback is smoother, large blurs and glows draw many times faster, and undo history takes far less memory.
• Less delay between the pen and the ink on screen.

Fixed

• When Windows logs off, shuts down or restarts for an update, every document with unsaved work gets a recovery copy, offered back at the next launch.
• A save after a full undo history no longer marks unsaved edits as saved.
• Fixed many ways the app could close: damaged video or painted cells, a group linked to a bone inside itself, disappearing folders, low disk space, license checks and more.
• The Eraser erases animated drawings too, on every key.
• The Fill bucket fills spaces closed by pencil and pen lines, and Close Gap closes a T-shaped opening.
• Videos in the Animation codec (.mov) play correctly instead of flickering.
• Working inside actions and symbols no longer loses keys, poses or edits, and saving while an action is open leaves it untouched.
• Adding a keyframe on an existing key keeps its easing and motion path handles.
• A locked bone stays exactly in place in deeper rigs.
• Many fixes to keying, undo, the Timeline and the canvas matching the exported file.

The full list of changes is in the changelog. Questions and reports: [email protected]