The interface

Menu bar

File holds documents and output: opening and saving projects, importing sprites and layered documents, and every kind of export. Edit holds undo, redo, settings presets, clearing hints, and copying a batch command. View holds view modes, zoom, the light and dark theme, whether the toolbox shows labels, and resetting the layout. Help holds the keyboard shortcut list and an about box. The about box names the version, and on the desktop build the folder where crash reports are written.

Options bar

Directly under the menus, and it changes with the selected tool. One control is always there:

• Always show hints — keep the painted hint overlay visible even when a tool that does not change hints is selected. Off by default, because the overlay is colored and it competes with the artwork. The artwork is dimmed under the overlay so the hints read against it.

With a painting tool selected you also get Size, the brush's width across. Type into the box beside the slider for a size past the slider's end. It has two remembered values, not one: tools that draw along a line start at your artwork's measured line width, and tools that fill a region start at roughly a twentieth of the sprite. Filling an arm with a two-pixel brush is not a tuning inconvenience, so the two are kept separate.

With the Zoom tool selected you get a zoom field, Fit and 100%.

On the right: the view switch (Art, Lit, Normal, Height, AO, Spec, Split), and Update live. Apply extra maps appears next to it in Lit and Split; off by default. See Lighting and preview.

Toolbox

Icons down one edge, in two columns: on the left the tools for looking, arranging, selecting, filling and erasing, and on the right the hints. Hover any of them for the full name and a sentence on what it means. Three things about it:

• It moves. Drag it anywhere; it snaps to the left or right edge and remembers where you left it.
• It can show names. View ▸ Show tool labels, for when the icons have not become familiar yet.
• Each hint tool has a colour, and it is the same colour that hint paints in the overlay, so a swatch in the toolbox tells you which tint on the artwork belongs to which tool.

Every tool has a single-key shortcut. See Tools.

Viewport

The artwork, at whatever zoom. Ctrl and the scroll wheel zooms around the pointer from any tool, which is the one you will use most. Zoom accepts fractional values and goes far enough out to see a large sprite whole.

Lights appear as small gizmos when the Lights tool is active. Clicking one selects it, and its controls are in the inspector's Lights tab; the inspector stays on whichever tab you had open.

Banners over the artwork — a slow solve offering to turn live updates off, a sprite that looks like an enlargement of pixel art, a hint that reached nothing — stay pinned to the top of the pane at full width. Zooming and scrolling the artwork does not move them.

If the sprite looks like an enlargement of pixel art, a banner names the size it thinks you drew at and offers to work there. See My pixel art comes out mushy.

Inspector

Down the right, in three tabs, in the order you usually want them: look at the lighting first, then change settings, and reach for layers last. The editor opens on Lights. New in 1.7.0.

Lights holds the light rig: a list at the top with add and remove, and the selected light's controls below it. A light stays on the canvas while you drag it, stopping at the edge. New in 1.7.0.

Solver holds the settings, in collapsible sections: Surface, Drawn lines, Detail methods, Solver, and On export for the height, occlusion and specular maps written beside the normal map. Solve detail with timings sits underneath. Anything that can be switched off has a checkbox; switching it off leaves its control visible but disabled at the value you last set, so you can see what it would go back to. The checkbox is the only switch: a slider dragged to zero stays on, so it comes straight back up. New in 1.5.1.

On a scene these are the selected layer's settings, not the document's, because layers are separate objects and a setting that suited a stone wall has no business governing the bottle in front of it. Frames are the other way round and share their settings. See Layers and scenes.

Some controls only mean anything once a matching hint is painted — Camera pitch and Tube axis reach, both under Surface. They stay where they are and say so underneath: "nothing is using this yet". Printed rather than hidden, because a control that vanished would be a control you could not find, and this is the answer to a question you have not thought to ask.

Layers holds the stack, topmost first, with visibility, renaming, reordering and deleting, and a Canvas panel showing the size everything exports at. Selecting a row points the brush and the Solver tab at that layer.

Every control has a small ? beside it. Hover it for an explanation of what that control means. Visible text in the panels is reserved for warnings — if a paragraph is showing, something needs your attention.

Frame strip

Along the bottom, and only when more than one frame is open. Thumbnails of the artwork, in frame order, with a dot on any frame that has hints painted on it. See Frames and animation.

On a scene the thumbnails are the composited picture and the dot is about the selected layer — whether that layer has hints at that frame. See Layers and frames together.

Status bar

Facts about the current state, along the bottom edge:

• The sprite's name and pixel dimensions, and the zoom. On a scene those dimensions are the selected layer's artwork. The canvas size lives in the Layers tab.
• Coverage — how much of the canvas the artwork occupies.
• Outline — the length of the silhouette in pixels. If this is zero, nothing can be solved.
• Hints — how many hint layers have anything painted on them.
• Solve time, and whether the result is a draft or final.
• GPU or CPU, telling you which ran the last solve. See Performance and hardware.
• Messages: what was just saved, what was just imported, and warnings worth reading.

Theme

View ▸ Theme offers Light, Dark, or following your system setting, which is the default. The choice is remembered between sessions and applied before the window paints, so there is no flash of the wrong theme on startup.