Troubleshooting

The result looks quilted, or pillowy

Every region between lines bulges up on its own, so the character reads as padded panels rather than one solid form.

Turn up Follow overall form in the inspector, under Surface. That is precisely what it is for: it makes the regions agree about the overall shape of the subject and carry their detail on top of it, rather than each rounding independently.

If it is already on and the effect persists, the likely cause is too much detected line work chopping the surface into small cells. Check in Normal view: if you can see creases where the artwork has only shading, lower Max colourfulness so those coloured marks stop counting as line work, or paint over them with Remove stroke E.

A limb blends into the body behind it

Light above an arm also lights the stomach below it, and the arm has no sense of being a separate thing.

Fill the arm with In front D. Where two parts overlap, the shared edge is indistinguishable from a fold in one continuous surface, so without being told, the tool folds the surface behind. This is the single most valuable hint on character art with overlapping limbs.

If the limb is also domed rather than tubular, add a Tube axis A stroke down its length.

A hard edge looks rounded

A blade, a plank, a cut-off panel has a rolled lip it should not have.

Paint Cut outline C along the outline itself. Painted inside the shape it does nothing, and the application will tell you so after the stroke.

Texture detail becomes a field of little bumps

Scales, cross-hatching, stippling — each mark gets its own ridge.

Every one of those marks is being detected as line work, which is technically correct and not what you want. Two options, and they combine:

• Remove stroke E over the textured region, to stop the marks creasing the surface.
• Then, if the region needs some surface variation, fill it with Trust methods T and give a detail method a small weight.

An eye or a rivet reads flat

You erased the strokes around it, and now it catches no light at all — which is correct, because nothing left in the picture says it is round.

Fill it with Convex area O. The shape's edge becomes the rim of a dome rather than a fold, and it will catch a highlight as the light moves. Use Concave area I for the opposite: a crater, a dent, a socket.

The result is nearly flat, or nonsense

Check the status bar. If Outline reads zero, or Coverage is close to 100%, your sprite has no transparency around it — so there is no silhouette, and the silhouette is what everything is solved from. Trim the sprite or paint the background out.

The application warns about this on load, and it is the single most common cause of a result that looks like nothing.

A fold I can plainly see has no effect

The detection did not find that line. Usual causes, in order:

1. The line is too close in colour to what it sits on. Lower Stroke darkness.
2. The line is drawn in a saturated colour and is being excluded as shading. Raise Max colourfulness.
3. Contrast radius is too small for the line's width. A soft or broad stroke compared against a surround inside itself reads as a series of beads rather than a continuous line. Check what was measured — it is named above the control.

Or just paint it: Add stroke B over the line.

Painted shading is being read as a fold

Lower Max colourfulness, which is the control that separates near-neutral ink from coloured shadow. Or paint over it with Remove stroke E, which is faster if it is confined to one area.

I painted a hint and nothing happened

Three hints have a precondition and the application tells you when it is unmet, immediately after the stroke:

• "this cut touches no outline pixels" — Cut outline must be painted on the outline.
• "the axis never reaches the outline — raise the reach" — raise Tube axis reach to at least about half the limb's width.
• "no method has weight yet" — Trust methods scopes detail methods, and every method is at zero. Give one a weight.

No message and no change usually means the hint agreed with what the tool had already concluded.

Every bump reads as a dent in my engine

The green channel convention. Either the wrong target was exported, or your engine is also applying a flip at import.

The flip is already baked into the file, so leave Flip Green Channel — or Godot's Invert Y — off. Export a calibration target once and this stops being a question.

Everything got slow, and now there is an Update button

A solve took longer than about 0.8 seconds, so live updating switched itself off. It switches back on by itself once solves come back under about a quarter of a second.

To make solves cheaper: turn Follow overall form off, set any detail method weights to zero, or work at a smaller sprite size while dialling settings in. See Performance and hardware.

The status bar says CPU

Your graphics card could not be used. The inspector's Solve detail section says why, and that is the actionable part — usually a webview or browser without a working graphics backend, or a driver declining the request.

The output is the same either way; only the speed differs.

Frames in an animation disagree with each other

One frame reads differently from its neighbours, and it shows as flicker in motion.

• Fix the detection radius across the batch. In the editor, set Contrast radius by hand rather than leaving it measured. On the command line, pass --radius <n> instead of letting it measure per sprite.
• Check for a hint painted on one frame and not the next. The dots on the frame strip show which frames have hints.

Reload from source is greyed out

Either the sprite did not arrive from a layered document, or the file was opened by a route that cannot be repeated — a drag and drop, or a browser without the File System Access API. Re-import through File ▸ Import and reload becomes available.

The file box opened twice, or saving went to my downloads folder

Some browsers offer the file dialogs and then refuse to let a page use them: a policy set by an IT department, a hardened or locked-down profile, or a "file editing" permission switched off in site settings. The editor finds this out the only way it can, by trying — so the very first file command puts up its own box and then the browser's plain one. It says which browser message it got, in the status bar, and uses the plain box from then on.

That answer is remembered between sessions, so it happens once rather than once per startup. Everything still works, with two differences: saving lands in your downloads folder instead of a folder you choose, and Reload from source is unavailable.

If you allow file editing for this site afterwards, choose View ▸ Reset interface to defaults to make the editor try the dialogs again — otherwise it will go on believing what it was told. The desktop build is not affected either way.

Still stuck

Email support. A sprite that reproduces the problem, or the project file, gets a much faster answer than a description — and File ▸ Export hint layers… is a good way to show exactly what the solver was given.