Celas Studio 0.11.0: Brushes, Shapes, Pen Tools and Navigator
Celas Studio · published · build 25515280
Celas Studio 0.11.0 is now available!
This is our largest update since the start of Early Access, bringing close to 100 new features and improvements, along with more than 500 fixes across the application.
This update focuses heavily on drawing and vector tools, with a completely rebuilt brush library, new shape tools, major improvements to the Pen and Node tools, a new Navigator panel, better video and audio support, significant performance improvements, and many stability fixes.
A Completely Rebuilt Brush Library
The brush library has received its biggest overhaul yet.
Brush tips have been rebuilt from real pencil, charcoal, pastel, bristle, oil, and watercolour marks at four times the previous resolution. The library now includes 109 brushes, covering graphite, charcoal, pastel, oil, markers, brush pens, watercolour, textures, and more.
Pen tilt is now supported across the entire brush library. Pencil brushes, for example, can naturally transition from drawing with the tip to shading with the side of the lead as you tilt your pen.
Watercolour brushes have also been reworked to produce continuous washes instead of visible rows of individual brush stamps.
A new Effects family introduces brushes for Sparkle, Bokeh, Light Streak, Rain, Snow, Smoke, Fog, Fire, Paint Drips, and Petals.
The stabilizer has also been redesigned with separate Streamline and Smooth controls, while Brush Studio now includes a scratchpad where you can test brushes without touching your artwork.
New Shapes and Improved Vector Tools
The Shape tools have been greatly expanded with 14 new shapes:
Donut, Triangle, Diamond, Trapezoid, Heart, Drop, Pie, Cog, Crown, Segment, Crescent, Spiral, Scallop, and Cloud.
Each shape includes interactive handles that can be adjusted directly on the canvas.
Rectangle corners can now be controlled individually, with two additional corner styles: Cutout and Concave.
The Pen and Node tools have also received major improvements.
You can now click directly on a path to add a node, click an existing node to remove it, convert segments between lines and curves, and display the direction of a path.
The Node tool also introduces Sculpt Mode, allowing you to push and reshape paths more naturally, almost like working with clay.
Alignment guides now extend across the entire canvas, include distance information, and allow shapes to snap to the bounding boxes of other objects.
Vector shapes can also be converted into curves, while strokes can be expanded into filled shapes.
New Navigator and Workspace Improvements
A new Navigator panel is now available under Window > Navigator.
It provides an overview of the entire canvas and lets you quickly pan around your document, zoom, rotate, fit the canvas, and flip the view from one place.
There is also a dedicated Zoom tool with the Z shortcut, continuous zoom using Shift+Space, and Fit Selection with Ctrl+Shift+0.
Floating panel groups can now collapse down to their tabs, and floating panels include the same menu options as docked panels.
New Vector and Pixel menus have also been added to the menu bar, making many path, boolean, rasterization, and selection commands easier to find.
Better Video and Audio Support
Video and audio workflows have received extensive improvements.
Imported videos now bring their audio with them. Moving or trimming a video also moves its audio, while mute and volume controls are available directly from the layer.
Videos now play at their correct speed even when their frame rate differs from the project frame rate.
The previous video duration limitation has also been removed. Decoded frames are now cached to disk instead of being kept entirely in memory, allowing much longer videos to be used.
Projects no longer need to decode their videos again every time they are opened, and video importing is now significantly faster.
A new video cache section in Preferences lets you control the cache location, maximum size, current usage, and clear the cache when needed.
Audio and video layers now include a keyframeable Level property measured in decibels. Their waveform is displayed on its own track and visually responds to volume changes.
Transparent WebM video now preserves its transparency and can be scrubbed almost instantly. Transparent .mov files using the Animation codec can also be imported.
Video and image layers can now be used as clipping masks.
Animation Improvements
Smart Bone actions can now control Variant Layers.
This makes it possible to use Smart Bones to switch between mouth shapes, hand poses, head turns, and other variants as part of an action.
Rasterizing an animated layer now also preserves its animation.
Faster Drawing, Playback and Exporting
A larger part of the canvas is now rendered on the GPU.
Gradients, shadows, glows, and dashed outlines are significantly faster, with complex documents containing many of these effects drawing in roughly half the time.
Pixel Mode is now more than twice as fast, while 3D-transformed layers and motion blur require considerably less processing.
Image sequence, MOV, and GIF exports can now use all available CPU cores, making many exports several times faster without changing the resulting files.
Painting has also been optimized so the brush follows the pen more closely, especially during fast strokes.
Stability and Fixes
More than 500 fixes are included in Celas Studio 0.11.0.
Several important project safety issues have been addressed. Saving now replaces the previous file atomically, preventing an interrupted save from destroying the last valid version of a project.
Opening a corrupt project will no longer remove the project that is already open, and several crashes involving motion blur, media assets, licenses, unavailable drives, and imported PSD files have been fixed.
Fast brush strokes no longer break into straight facets, pen pressure is sampled more accurately, layer effects are no longer clipped at the edge of the view, and motion blur now works correctly inside groups, on 3D layers, and in exported files.
Video playback, audio synchronization, keyframe editing, Align and Distribute, Undo, floating panels, onion skinning, vector strokes, rectangle corners, and many other areas have also received fixes and improvements.
The new tools and their options are available in all 12 supported languages.
Thank You!
Thank you to everyone who has sent us bug reports, feedback, and project files. They have been extremely helpful in tracking down issues and shaping this update.
Celas Studio is still in Early Access, and your feedback continues to play an important role in its development.
You can find the complete list of changes in the changelog.
For questions, bug reports, or feedback, contact us at:
Thank you for supporting Celas Studio!