Shack Animator 2D 1.4.0: Final Render, Shadows, True Colour + Video Course

A big one again. The renderer grew up: sorted transparency, shadows from every light, a new depth of field, ambient occlusion and a colour pipeline that looks the same in the viewport and in the exported video. Around it: Auto Key for drawing, a smarter raster fill, movable pivots, better imports, and a long list of fixes found while recording the video course.

The full video course is on YouTube

Watch on YouTube
116 lessons in 21 modules — from the first launch to the final cut of a finished cartoon: the interface, painting and brushes, frame-by-frame animation, vector lines and the "Klaus look", rigs and meshes, effects and cameras, sound, import and export. Every lesson is short, shows one thing step by step and was recorded in this version of the app.

• Watch the course: start with lesson 0.1 — What Is Shack Animator 2D; all 116 lessons are in the playlist "Shack Animator 2D - Full Video Course" on the channel.

Render and lighting

• Final quality: every transparent pixel is sorted per pixel, so overlapping see-through layers, glows and soft edges blend in the right order. Export can supersample for smooth edges.
• Shadows from every light type: point, spot and directional lights cast shadows. Cards with transparent areas cast the shape of what is drawn on them. Per layer: Cast Shadows on or off. Per light: shadow strength, softness and bias.
• Up to 32 lights in a scene (was 8); beyond that the most relevant ones are used.
• New depth of field: proper bokeh, sharp objects keep clean edges over a blurred background, and glows or see-through layers no longer pull the background into focus.
• Ambient light and ambient occlusion: a scene setting for soft ambient light, and computed AO that darkens places where surfaces come close — on cards and on 3D meshes.
• 3D card scenes: cards facing different ways now draw in the right order — no more popping or flickering when the camera moves.
• Effects and the camera: choose whether an effect sits in the scene (blurred by depth of field) or on the lens (after it).
• Compositing passes: export Depth and CoC (blur size) as 16-bit PNGs.
• Channel views (Normal, Roughness, ...) show the scene the way the lit view stacks it, vector layers included.
• Particles: smoother motion, no more jitter; Snow, Smoke and Sparks presets and a Direction field; particles hide correctly behind cards in 3D scenes.
• Group opacity now fades everything inside the group.
• Rain starts already falling in a render, not as a pale haze for the first second.

Lesson 14.3 — The Lens: Perspective, Ortho, Depth of Field

Colour you can trust

• One display transform everywhere: the viewport, the camera monitor and the exported video now look the same. The scene renders in high precision and is converted to the screen once.
• ACEScg working space with correct conversions and soft gamut compression instead of hard clipping.
• Colour version 2 for new projects: textures are stored the way you paint them, so blending looks like in other painting apps. Older projects keep their look until you convert them (Settings > Color Management).
• Imports respect embedded colour profiles (PSD, mesh textures, Spine atlases). PNG export has straight alpha, video is tagged as BT.709.
• The eyedropper picks the rendered scene, and light and mesh colour swatches show the colour they really render.
• Colour settings are saved with the project, and changing them marks the project as modified.

Lesson 19.2 — Colour Management

Drawing and painting

• Auto Key for drawing: with AK on, a brush stroke on a held frame creates a new empty drawing there — draw the next pose over the onion skin. One Ctrl+Z removes the stroke and the new drawing.
• Smarter raster fill: stops at dark lines, reaches under their soft edges, can fill behind the drawing, and can look at all visible layers ("Sample: All visible layers"). The old "Rect" mode is now called "Fill All".
• Selection tool: one choice — Rectangle, Ellipse or Lasso. Combined selections (add / subtract) delete, cut and undo correctly, and rotating a selection no longer squashes it.
• Pen tablets: no stray dot at the start of a stroke after using the mouse, no stray dot when lifting the pen, and switching the tablet backend works without restarting.
• Pressure curves have titles and axis labels.
• The brush cursor follows your pen: while you paint, the brush outline shows the size your current pressure gives.
• Onion skin, "Keys only": on a held frame you now see both the previous and the next pose.
• Brush Creator and Tool Presets:
  • preset icons get the same rounded tile as the bundled ones;
  • the icon is taken from your test strokes, and Clear Icon really clears it;
  • "+ New Preset" starts from a clean brush (Duplicate is there for copies);
  • no false "modified" dot right after applying a preset;
  • erasing on the test pad no longer leaves a light rim;
  • the Stamp Creator window is resizable and shows the whole canvas;
  • re-importing a brush pack you exported skips the presets you already have.

• First run: black brush colour and a dense default brush.

Lesson 5.2 — Cels and Exposure: I, D and Holds

Vector layers

• Crop to Drawing: shrink a vector layer to what is drawn on it.
• Shift with Rectangle / Ellipse makes a real square / circle on any layer size.
• Brush-stamp lines at large widths print along the whole path.
• Inbetween partner: "(none - holds)" removes a pairing.
• Pen: the node or handle a click would grab is highlighted while you draw.
• Soft-edge guides follow the real blur edge; normals follow the fill.
• Path styles look the same in the Inspector and in Tool Settings.

Lesson 8.1 — An Expressive Line

Animation, rigs and the timeline

• Movable pivot for raster, vector and text layers, with a 3x3 anchor board in the Inspector.
• Timeline shortcuts work from the viewport: D duplicates a drawing from anywhere; Delete, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V act on the keys / drawings selected in the dope sheet.
• Hierarchy and Timeline: "only the selection" filter, and Alt+click on an eye to show only that layer.
• Auto Key off: a gizmo move on an animated layer stays until you change the frame, so I keys it.
• Rigs:
  • reset the pose to rest (whole rig or selected joints);
  • smooth 3D joint rotation (quaternion keys) with ease handles;
  • adding or removing a joint keeps the drawing bound and the keys on the right joints;
  • meshes made from the drawing's alpha bend cleanly at the joints;
  • delete buttons per constraint; easier joint picking while posing.

• Camera:
  • moving the camera with the mouse in camera view (8) is keyed with Auto Key;
  • new projects' camera frames the canvas, and "Frame Canvas" does it for any camera;
  • camera keys get interpolation in the Graph Editor;
  • the Camera Monitor comes back on screen after a monitor is unplugged and leaves fullscreen at its old size.

• Selecting keys on long shots: Ctrl+A selects every key of the rows shown, [ and ] select the keys before / after the playhead, Shift+click on a key in another row selects the whole box between them, and the Alt marquee scrolls the dope sheet when held at its edge. Huge selections no longer slow the timeline down.
• Faster scrubbing that reuses the playback cache; the Graph Editor selects a key on click without moving it.

Lesson 11.1 — The Rig and Joints

Import and export

• Imports come in at the canvas' pixel density: a 1024-px wide picture is as wide as the default canvas — pictures, image sequences, video, PSD, Krita and SVG / Illustrator / PDF.
• Krita, SVG, Illustrator and PDF keep their layer order.
• PSD: more files open — Bitmap, Indexed, Grayscale, Duotone, CMYK and 16 / 32-bit documents come in as one flattened picture; unsupported modes say why.
• Video import: a video without sound imports its frames; image sequences import all frames by default.
• Audio: OGG files play; drop a sound onto the Timeline; files in folders with non-English names open; looping audio and Event sounds are now in the exported video.
• Video export:
  • saves next to the project by default, can open the result, and uses the playback range;
  • odd sizes (e.g. 1919x1079) export instead of failing;
  • Cancel stops encoding at once;
  • Undo and autosave work right after an export;
  • choosing "Full Cartoon" updates the frame range.

• Spine: a project exported to Spine comes back at its own frame rate; a failed import leaves nothing behind.
• Settings export / import is one .shack2dsettings file and carries your window layout.

Lesson 18.5 — Rendering the Whole Cartoon

Interface and workflow

• Notifications show save, export and import results right in the app.
• Floating windows get the main window's buttons: minimize to the taskbar, maximize to the whole screen (and back), and the red close button — for windows floating over the main window or outside it.
• New layers go on top of the Hierarchy — created, imported or pasted — and are the size of your canvas.
• Viewport: Delete / Backspace remove the selected layers; Ctrl+F frames lights, cameras, the whole selection and group contents; pressing the current view's key again re-frames it; clicks pick the nearest surface, through empty parts of cards and past locked layers.
• Object outlines: a switch to hide them, and an option to use each layer's Hierarchy colour.
• File > New asks about unsaved changes; the title bar shows * while there are unsaved changes; the selected layer is restored when you reopen a project.
• Windows: dialogs open centred, Esc closes menus, Reset All says what it resets.
• View cube: a slightly shaky click still counts as a click (it no longer turns the view), and a drag that starts in the viewport no longer grabs the cube.
• Russian interface fully translated; custom fonts and fonts in non-English folders no longer turn the text into "????".

Lesson 1.1 — Windows, Tabs and Layout

Fixes

• Fixed lost audio after saving a project several times (packed file names grew).
• Fixed hidden keyed lights showing up again.
• Fixed docking a detached panel back into the main window.
• Fixed clicks on a floating window painting the layer under it.
• Fixed tool hotkeys reacting to Ctrl / Alt (Ctrl+S no longer picks the Select tool).
• Fixed the render camera playing slower than real time with sound.
• Fixed undo needing two presses after a fill.
• Fixed an effect's "Affects" list: every change is one undo step, and undo no longer stops the effect.
• Fixed custom shaders ignoring their default parameter values.
• Fixed the reference wireframe on very small or very large models.
• Many smaller layout fixes in the Inspector and Tool Settings.

Demo

The demo includes all of the above. The demo limits stay the same:

• up to 150 frames on the timeline;
• video export up to 1280x720, with a watermark;
• no image-sequence or GIF export;
• up to 10 brush presets and 5 scenes;
• final render in the Lit mode only.

Klaus © The SPA Studios / Netflix. Shack Animator 2D is not affiliated with or endorsed by The SPA Studios or Netflix; the film is mentioned only as an inspiration.