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Pixel Mode

Pixel Mode snaps every shape, fill and stroke to a project-wide pixel grid, so vector drawing tools produce a crisp, authentic pixel-art result.

Pixel Mode and Pixel Size live in Project Settings. Pixel Mode is off by default, and Pixel Size defaults to 10 document pixels with a range of 1 to 512. This is the project's own drawing grid; it is separate from the display grid you can show for alignment in Preferences.

The on-canvas grid follows View ▸ Show Grid like any other grid, rather than being forced on because the project is in Pixel Mode. Pixel Mode itself no longer costs more to draw than the ordinary view.

The grid snaps in cell space

Turning Pixel Mode on does not just snap what you see on screen: it re-targets where paths, stroke widths and gradients actually land, in the grid's own space, before anything is drawn. Because of that, the same drawing lands on the same pixels no matter how far in or out you have zoomed, rather than shifting slightly as the screen-space rounding changes with zoom.

Per-layer Anti-alias

Anti-alias is a property of each Shape or Vector layer, on by default. It decides how a cell on the pixel grid is resolved once Pixel Mode is on:

  • On: each cell blends toward the average colour of whatever covers it, giving soft coverage at the pixel-grid scale
  • Off: each cell is fully opaque or fully cleared, using the majority colour inside it, avoiding a washed-out seam where a fill and a stroke would otherwise average together

Fill and stroke are snapped as two separate passes with their own thresholds, so a thin stroke does not vanish at a coverage level that would still register for a filled area.

Effects and masks

A layer with any active effects snaps once, at the effect's finished output, rather than snapping the bare shape underneath it first. A masked layer snaps its fill, its stroke, the mask shape itself, and any stroke that spills past the mask, all together: snapping only some of those would soften edges that should stay hard.

Effect output is snapped by averaging rather than by thresholding, so a shadow stays a falloff and a glow stays a ramp. What you get is the banded version of that falloff, which is exactly how a glow is drawn by hand in pixel art, instead of a hard slab of colour. Opacity therefore reads as opacity, and raising an effect's Size grows it instead of shrinking it.

Pixel Mode snapping runs inside the renderer itself, not as a screen-only preview trick, so the same crisp grid you see on canvas is what ends up in a rendered frame, an export or an Artwall upload. Every one of those used to render the smooth vector picture instead, which is fixed.

At an extreme zoom level, or on a very large canvas, Celas Studio falls back to an ordinary screen-space snap rather than building a pixel-grid buffer that would be too large to be practical.

Shape layers and full rigs still work normally in Pixel Mode. Nothing about drawing, bones or animation changes. Only the way fills, strokes and effects resolve onto the grid does.

The same curved shape in Pixel Mode, once with Anti-alias on showing soft coverage at the grid edges, and once with it off showing hard, fully opaque cells.