The Tools panel
How the Tools panel is laid out, how you switch tool, what the Tool Options bar does, and which tools need which kind of layer.
Every drawing, editing and rigging action in Celas Studio starts with a tool. The Tools panel holds twenty-two slots, one of which is shared by the eighteen shapes, and the bar above the canvas shows the options for whichever tool is active.
The panel is hidden on the Home screen, and its buttons are greyed out until a project is open. Show or hide it from Window ▸ Tools.
How the panel is laid out
The buttons flow left to right and wrap onto a new row when they run out of width, so the panel works as a tall single column, a short wide strip, or anything in between. When it floats, its width snaps to a whole number of button columns and its height fits the rows exactly: you cannot end up with a half-empty row.
There is no title bar, no tab and no close button. You drag the panel by the grip: a vertical pill down the left edge when the grid is three rows or fewer, and a horizontal pill across the top from four rows up.
Switching tool
Click a button, or press the tool's key. Hovering a button shows the tool name and its current key, read live from your shortcut settings, so the tooltip is right even after you rebind it. Every tool key is rebindable under Preferences ▸ Shortcuts, and none of them fires while you are typing in a text field.
Switching tool cancels whatever was half-finished: an open brush stroke is abandoned and its undo step closed, and any pen, pencil or shape you were drawing is dropped. The one thing that survives is a vertex selection, which is kept when you move between the Node and Transform tools so you can scale or rotate the points you just picked.
The tools
The buttons are ordered in six function groups, roughly the order a drawing is actually built, with a hairline divider between each pair of groups. The divider is drawn in the gap that was already there, so grouping costs no extra width: only a row break at a boundary adds a little space.
| Group | Tool | Key | What it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 · Select & transform | Move | V | Pick layers, move them, and build boolean groups |
| Transform | Ctrl+T | Scale and rotate the selection with a gizmo, or skew, bend into perspective, distort and warp it | |
| Marquee | M | Make a pixel selection: rectangle, ellipse, polygon, freehand, or painted with a brush | |
| Magic Wand | W | Select a region of matching colour on the active layer or on everything visible | |
| 2 · Path & shape | Pen | P | Draw bezier paths one point at a time |
| Node | A | Edit points, handles, corner radii and line width | |
| Shape | U | Rectangle, Ellipse, Polygon, Star and fourteen more parametric shapes | |
| Line | L | Draw straight ink lines, bend them and chain them into one path | |
| Knife | Shift+K | Split or trim vector shapes and strokes | |
| 3 · Paint | Pencil | N | Draw freehand vector lines, or paint pixels on a bitmap layer |
| Brush | B | Paint: vector blobs on a Shape or Vector Cells layer, pixels elsewhere | |
| Eraser | E | Erase pixels, or cut erased areas out of vector shapes | |
| Smudge | S | Smear, blur, sharpen, lighten, darken or clone pixels, or drag vector points like a magnet | |
| 4 · Colour | Gradient | G | Create and edit a gradient on a shape, or bake one onto pixels |
| Fill | K | Recolour a shape, fill an enclosed region, or flood-fill pixels | |
| Eyedropper | I | Sample a colour from the canvas | |
| 5 · Rig | Bone | J | Draw, move and pose an armature |
| Bone Bind | Shift+J | Bind vertices to bones and paint weights | |
| 6 · Framing & view | Camera | C | Move the camera (Animate mode only) |
| Hand | H | Pan the view | |
| Rotate View | R | Rotate the view | |
| Zoom | Z | Drag to zoom, click to step in, Alt+click to step out |
Two placements are deliberate rather than obvious. The Knife sits with the path tools because it cuts a path, not pixels. The Fill sits with the Gradient because both flood a region, flat against graded, and the Eyedropper closes that group as the source both take their colour from.
U selects the shape tool and brings back the shape you last drew with; Shift+U steps to the next of the eighteen shapes. Keeping the two apart means coming back to the tool never changes which shape you get. The Line is a tool of its own on L.
Hold a tool's key instead of tapping it and the tool is only borrowed: use it, let go of the key, and the tool you were on comes back. A tap still switches for good.
The Tool Options bar
The Tool Options bar sits above the canvas at a fixed height. It cannot be resized or docked elsewhere. When a tool has more options than the window is wide enough to hold, what does not fit moves behind a small arrow at the end of the row and comes back out when there is room again. Everything on the bar belongs to the tool you are using.
With no project open the bar is empty but keeps its height. The Hand, Rotate View and Zoom tools genuinely have no options, so for those three the bar stays empty: nothing has failed to load.
Tool options are remembered between sessions.
Tools and layer types
Some tools make their own layer when there is nowhere to draw. The Pen, the Line tool and the shape tools create a Shape layer whatever is selected. The Brush and the Pencil share a New Layer option in their options bar, Vector or Pixel, which decides what the first stroke creates when nothing is selected; it starts on Vector. The Fill tool creates a Pixel layer when nothing paintable is selected.
Others need the right layer and do nothing without it. Bone Bind needs an armature with at least one bone. The Camera tool only responds in Animate mode. Where a tool has nothing to act on, it usually does nothing quietly rather than warning you.
A few tools change what they do based on the selected layer rather than refusing: the Pencil paints pixels when a Raster Cells or Pixel layer is selected, the Brush paints crisp vector blobs on a Shape or Vector Cells layer, the Eraser erases pixels, cuts vector shapes, or paints on a new layer depending on what it finds, and the Gradient tool edits a shape's fill on a Shape layer and bakes into the pixels on a Raster Cells or Pixel one.