The interface

Menu bar

File holds documents and output: opening and saving projects, importing sprites and layered documents, and every kind of export. Edit holds undo, redo, settings presets, clearing hints, and copying a batch command. View holds view modes, zoom, the light and dark theme, whether the toolbox shows labels, and resetting the layout. Help holds the keyboard shortcut list and an about box.

Options bar

Directly under the menus, and it changes with the selected tool. Two controls are always there:

• Always show hints — keep the painted hint overlay visible even when a non-painting tool is selected. Off by default, because the overlay is coloured and it competes with the artwork.
• Onion skin — how strongly the overlay is drawn. Turn it down to check a mask against the line it is correcting.

With a painting tool selected you also get Radius, the brush size. It has two remembered values, not one: tools that draw along a line start at your artwork's measured line width, and tools that fill a region start at roughly a twentieth of the sprite. Filling an arm with a two-pixel brush is not a tuning inconvenience, so the two are kept separate.

With the Zoom tool selected you get a zoom field, Fit and 100%.

Toolbox

Icons down one edge. Hover any of them for the full name and a sentence on what it means. Three things about it:

• It moves. Drag it anywhere; it snaps to the left or right edge and remembers where you left it.
• It can show names. View ▸ Show tool labels, for when the icons have not become familiar yet.
• Each hint tool has a colour, and it is the same colour that hint paints in the overlay, so a swatch in the toolbox tells you which tint on the artwork belongs to which tool.

Every tool has a single-key shortcut. See Tools.

Viewport

The artwork, at whatever zoom. Ctrl and the scroll wheel zooms around the pointer from any tool, which is the one you will use most. Zoom accepts fractional values and goes far enough out to see a large sprite whole.

Lights appear as small gizmos when the Lights tool is active. Clicking one selects it and brings the Lights tab forward in the inspector.

Inspector

Down the right, in two tabs.

Solver holds the settings, in collapsible sections: Surface, Drawn lines, Detail methods and Solver, plus a Solve detail section with timings. Anything that can be switched off has a checkbox; switching it off leaves its control visible but disabled at the value you last set, so you can see what it would go back to.

Lights holds the light rig: a list at the top with add and remove, and the selected light's controls below it.

Every control has a small ? beside it. Hover it for an explanation of what that control means. Visible text in the panels is reserved for warnings — if a paragraph is showing, something needs your attention.

Frame strip

Along the bottom, and only when more than one frame is open. Thumbnails of the artwork, in frame order, with a dot on any frame that has hints painted on it. See Frames and animation.

Status bar

Facts about the current state, along the bottom edge:

• The sprite's name and pixel dimensions, and the zoom.
• Coverage — how much of the canvas the artwork occupies.
• Outline — the length of the silhouette in pixels. If this is zero, nothing can be solved.
• Hints — how many hint layers have anything painted on them.
• Solve time, and whether the result is a draft or final.
• GPU or CPU, telling you which ran the last solve. See Performance and hardware.
• Messages: what was just saved, what was just imported, and warnings worth reading.

Theme

View ▸ Theme offers Light, Dark, or following your system setting, which is the default. The choice is remembered between sessions and applied before the window paints, so there is no flash of the wrong theme on startup.