Studio.

Timeline · exposure · graph editor

Time.

A drawing holds for as long as its cel says: on 1s, 2s or 3s, with the X-sheet as another view of the same timing. Anything that moves is a Controller with keys, and the graph editor shapes the curve between them.

Keys carry hold, linear, bezier and eased interpolation, with auto, aligned, broken or flat tangents; curves can cycle, ping-pong or offset. The presets below are the graph editor’s own names.

X-sheet · exposure · cycles

Sheet.

The exposure sheet, kept the way it has been since the first cartoons: one row per frame, one column per level, a number where a drawing starts and a line down while it holds. Type on it like a sheet: 5 Enter, x for a blank, 1-12 for a run. The bars under the picture are the same timing, drawn as a timeline.

In Encre the X-sheet isn’t a second timing system. It’s another view of the Exposure track, with the same playhead, selection and undo. A number that doesn’t exist yet makes a new drawing with that name; painting on an empty frame makes one too, and painting on a held frame keeps drawing into the held one. Repeat turns a run into a cycle: change the source once and every repeat follows.

follow_path

Path.

Draw a path and let a Controller travel it. Progress, start and end, duration, orient to the curve, bank into the turns, offsets, and what happens at the end: hold, loop or ping-pong.

One of Encre’s 27 motion modifiers, closed-form in time like all of them: scrub anywhere and it’s already correct.

Rig · multiplane camera · truck

Depth.

The man from the walk, skiing, then driving home. Every piece of the picture sits on a plane at a depth, and the camera moves through them: a pan past mountains that barely move, then a truck in behind him, where the trees swell and rush past because they really are getting closer.

This is Encre’s Shot Camera math: every layer has a depth, and trucking in makes each plane bigger by how close it’s getting, which is real pinhole perspective. The road loops because the truck is keyed over one stretch of road and set to repeat, and each slice of road is drawn the same as the one before it. The man is on a plane pushed so far back that he stays locked to the lens. The rig beside the shot is what drew him: two-bone IK for the legs and arms, poles that plant on the snow.

Vector ink

Vector.

Vector strokes stay curves: anchors with in and out handles, corner, smooth or symmetric. The ink around the spine is a width profile — knots along its length, a base width, tapers — so a G-Pen line can be reshaped and thickened long after it was drawn.

The five vector ink presets below are the app’s own. Booleans, trim and cut work on the same paths.

After Émile Cohl · Fantasmagorie, 1908

Line.

In 1908 Émile Cohl drew about 700 white lines on black, and a little man turned into a flower, an elephant, a house, and back again. It was the first fully animated film. This is a homage to it in one chalk line.

Cohl drew every frame, and in Encre you would too: vector ink on 1s or 2s, with onion skin and the X-sheet. The boil stands in for Encre’s line boil Look node, a seeded wobble along each line that changes with every drawing. The in-betweens here come from matching points between key drawings. That shape blend comes with the rig in Beta 3.

Squash · stretch · follow path · impact

Classics.

The exercises every animator learns and the pictures everyone remembers, redrawn: the flour sack that jumps, Muybridge’s galloping horse, and a capsule that lands in the Moon’s eye.

Comics · bubbles · text

Panels.

Cut a page into panels, drop drawings in, and letter it. Bubbles are parametric — speech, thought, whisper, shout, explosion, caption — with tails that join the balloon as one shape, aimed at the speaker, and lettering that fits itself: Auto Fit wraps overflowing text and shrinks it to the balloon, keeping the letters’ proportions.

The seven bubble presets here are the app’s: lobes, spikes and wobble each with their own seed, so a bubble never looks stamped.

Drawing assistants · shape assist

Guides.

Draw freehand and let an assistant keep you honest. Perspective pulls lines to their vanishing points; the ruler holds a line on it or parallel to it anywhere on the page; ellipses stay concentric; symmetry mirrors every stroke. Or draw a rough shape and hold still — Shape Assist turns it into the line, arc, circle, ellipse or rectangle you meant.

Encre ships ruler, perspective, ellipse, spherical, grid, symmetry, shape-assist and reference-edge assistants; the ellipse and spherical guides draw parallel circles, and the grid draws parallel or ray lines.

3D reference · IK · Asset Studio

Pose.

Pose a figure the way you’d pose a real one: pull a hand and the arm follows, pin the feet and move the hips, and the knees bend to stay on the floor. Then drop a prop in — a chair, a car, a whole room — sit the figure on it, and place the render straight into your panel as a drawing to trace over.

Encre’s reference viewer has a humanoid IK solver: targets for head, chest, pelvis, hands and feet; elbow and knee poles; pins, foot plant and joint limits. The Asset Studio takes GLB and FBX models, renders them as ink, silhouette or lit clay, saves poses to your library, and drops the render onto the canvas as a layer. This mannequin and chair are a small stand-in drawn by the page.

Look · pixel nodes

Pixel.

Turn any shot into pixel art without redrawing it: a cell size, a palette to lock to, nearest or averaged sampling, and outline cleanup that keeps the ink edges dark. Posterize and ordered dither for the rest.

Palette matching is plain squared distance in sRGB with a fixed tie-break, so the same shot always lands on the same pixels.

Rig · head turn

Rig.

Bones, bind and weights, mesh deform, and poses you blend with a pad. A head turn is a set of named poses — front, three-quarter, profile, up, down — blended by two channels, turn_x and turn_y, so animating a face is animating two numbers.

Coming in Beta 3. This preview blends drawn poses the way the rig is designed to; the rig itself is being built now.

Assets · library · presets

Library.

Everything you make can be kept: drawings, props, characters, poses, looks, environments, motion. Drag a prop into the shot, then give it a preset — the Motion Library ships 39, from a gentle bob to an earthquake.

Encre shares one catalog with the Asset Browser in Maya: models, materials, HDRIs, images and storyboard projects, tagged, searchable and thumbnailed, with Poly Haven downloads built in.

Export · formats · delivery

Deliver.

One export core for everything that leaves Encre. Every frame is rendered by the same compositor you draw in, so scrub, playback and export match; every output carries a sidecar that says exactly how it was made.

The first beta exports PNG sequences, storyboard and comic pages, and contact sheets. Video masters, EXR passes, PDF and CBZ, EDL and OTIO, and USD handoff come in the Delivery phase on the way to 1.0; each is marked below.