Enkava User Guide

How to draw, paint, animate, rig, and export — right in your browser.

Nothing here needs an install or an account. The editor is a single web page: open it, make a project, and your work autosaves to the browser as you go.

You can make a free account if you want your projects in the cloud and openable on another device (§18A) — but it's entirely optional, and every drawing, animation and export feature works the same whether you sign in or not.

1The two kinds of project

When you start a project you pick a mode, and it's locked for that project:

• Pixel — for sprite art and pixel animation. Every pixel is one hard-edged color; the grid, palette, and crisp scaling are all built for this.
• Freeform — a Procreate-style painting mode. Soft brushes, partial transparency, blending, texture brushes, and the Pen/Shape vector tools all live here.

There is also a Print variant of freeform: it carries a physical size + DPI so exports print at their true size, and you get a CMYK soft-proof preview.

Pick a canvas size from the preset dropdown (game sprites and tiles, retro screens like Game Boy / SNES / NES, or modern resolutions up to 8K), or type a width and height. Then press New.

2The workspace

• Canvas (center) — where you draw. A checkerboard shows transparency.
• Toolbar (left) — the tools (brush, eraser, fill, …).
• Layers panel (floating, top-right) — drag it by its header to move it, and drag any corner to resize it. It's slightly see-through, so you can tell when it's sitting over artwork you care about. The ▾ button collapses it to just its title bar. Its size is remembered between sessions.
• Frame bar (bottom) — thumbnails of your animation frames, plus playback and the Sheet button.
• Animation panel / dope sheet — opens from the frame bar (see §11). Drag its top edge to make it taller or shorter.
• File menu (top-left) — New, Save, Load, Projects, and every Export.
• Panels menu (top) — show/hide whole panels: tools, layers, the animation panel, the preview popup, the reference panel, Symmetry and Symbols.
• View menu (top) — what's drawn on and around the canvas: onion skin, rulers, the origin crosshair, the print proof, and the bone chips on layer rows.
• Sign in (top-right) — optional accounts and cloud projects (§18A).
• Status bar — the active tool, tip size, and quick hints.

Some tools bring their own floating panel — the brush library, the gradient editor, the text styling panel, and the Bone and Mesh panels (§14.4). Each opens with its tool, steps out of the way when you pick a different tool, and comes back the way you left it when you return — so the only tool panel on screen is the one belonging to the tool in your hand. Re-tap the tool's button to show or hide it. Drag them by the header; where you leave them is remembered between sessions.

Almost every panel can be collapsed, and the layers/preview panels can be dragged out of the way.

3Moving around the canvas

• Zoom — mouse wheel (zooms toward the cursor), or + / -.
• Pan — hold Space or Enter and drag, or middle-mouse drag, or the Pan tool (H). On a touchscreen, two fingers pan and pinch.
• Fit to screen — press 0.

The canvas can go up to 8K. Big canvases work, but each large frame uses a lot of memory and saving gets heavy — the editor is happiest with small-to-medium art and lots of frames.

4Drawing tools

• Brush (B) — paint with the active color.
• Eraser (E) — erase to transparent. (Right-drag erases with any paint tool.)
• Fill / bucket (G) — flood-fill an area. Right-click fills with transparency. In freeform there's a "Fill tolerance" slider for soft edges. On a vector layer the bucket works differently and much better — see §8B.
• Eyedropper (I, or hold Alt and click) — pick a color off the canvas.
• Smudge (U, freeform only) — drags the colors already on the layer, like a wet finger. The Strength slider sets how far they carry.
• Gradient (Shift+G, freeform only) — drag to fill the layer with a smooth linear or radial gradient, with a full multi-stop color editor. See §5A.
• Text (T, freeform only) — click to place editable type that stays live and re-editable. See §8A.
• Mesh / warp (Shift+M) — drag a layer's mesh points to squash, stretch and bend the artwork. Needs no rig. See §14.4.

Brush size: the [ and ] keys shrink/grow the tip, or use the Size box.

• Pixel mode: tip is 1–64 px, square or round.
• Freeform: tips go much larger and are always round, with a Hardness slider (hard edge → soft airbrush) and an Opacity slider.

Pressure: if you draw with a pen/stylus, pressure tapers the stroke naturally. A mouse paints at full pressure.

5Brushes & the brush library (freeform)

Freeform mode has a brush library with texture brushes. Open it by tapping the Brush tool again when it's already active (or the "Brush: …" button).

• Presets: round (hard/soft), chalk, spray, bristle, stipple.
• A Vector tab holds the vector engines — Pen (pressure-tapered) and Marker (uniform ribbon). Painting with one records an editable path instead of pixels, hopping to (or creating) a vector layer automatically.
• Import your own: click + and pick a PNG — its shape becomes a stamp.
• Your imported brushes and current selection are remembered across sessions.

Brush depth — at the bottom of the library, three sliders shape how any brush lays down paint, saved per brush (so each one keeps its own feel):

• Spacing — how far apart the tip is stamped along the stroke. Low = a smooth solid line; high = a dotted / beaded line.
• Scatter — how far each stamp is randomly nudged off the stroke. 0 = right on the line; high = a spray / confetti cloud (great for foliage, stars, grain).
• Flow — how much paint each individual stamp lays down. Opacity caps the whole stroke; lower flow builds up gradually as stamps overlap (soft-pencil shading). 100% is the classic full-strength stamp.

Smudge smears through the active brush tip, so a textured tip gives a textured smear (pick Round for a smooth smudge).

5AThe gradient tool (freeform)

The Gradient tool (Shift+G) fills the active layer with a smooth blend of colors. Drag on the canvas to set it: for a linear gradient the drag is the color ramp (start → end); for a radial one the drag is center → radius, so the color rings outward. Hold Shift to snap the drag to 45° angles.

Tapping the tool again opens the gradient editor (a floating panel):

• Linear / Radial — the gradient shape.
• The bar shows the blend; the round handles below it are the color stops.
• Double-click the bar to add a stop; drag a handle to move it; the Delete button removes the selected one (a gradient always keeps at least two).
• Click the color swatch to recolor the selected stop, and set its alpha (a stop can be fully transparent — the default is color → transparent).

A gradient clips to an active selection (fill just a sky, say) and respects a layer's alpha lock. It's one undo step, and it's remembered between sessions. (Gradients are freeform only — pixel mode keeps hard-edged color.)

6Color & palettes

The color strip sits under the toolbar. Click a swatch to select it; colors you paint with are auto-added, and a Recents row keeps your latest picks.

The color picker — click the big color well (above the strip) to open a full HSB picker: a saturation/brightness square, a hue strip, and H/S/B, R/G/B and hex fields. Double-click a palette swatch to edit that swatch in place with the same picker.

• Curated palettes — swap in ready-made strips (Sweetie-16, PICO-8, …).
• Save as… — store your current strip as a named user palette.
• Import / Export — load or save Lospec .hex and .gpl palette files.

Print projects also show a CMYK readout for the picked color.

6AThe reference panel

Turn it on in Panels → "Reference panel" to float a picture beside your canvas to work from. Click + (or drag an image onto the panel) to load one; drag to pan it and use the wheel to zoom. With the eyedropper (or holding Alt), click the reference image to pick a color straight out of it into your paint color.

The reference lives in this browser session and isn't saved into the project.

7Selections & transform

There are three ways to select an area:

• Select (S) — drag out a rectangle.
• Lasso (L) — drag for a freehand outline, or click to place straight-edged points and click the first point to close (the same drag-vs-click split the Pen uses).
• Wand (W) — click to grab a connected area of similar color; the Fill tolerance slider sets how similar.

With any of them, Shift adds to the selection and Alt subtracts. The select bar also gives you invert, grow / shrink, feather (soften the edge, freeform), and "select layer alpha" (select exactly what the layer has painted).

Contents only — with the Lasso picked, a checkbox appears under the tools. Turn it on and the lasso keeps only the part of the area you traced that the current layer has actually drawn on. So you can loop roughly around a character, nowhere near its edges, and get a selection that hugs the character instead of a box full of empty space. Soft and antialiased edges stay soft, so what you cut or move comes away cleanly. Leave it off and the lasso selects everything you circle, as before.

Select all — Ctrl+A grabs the whole canvas (on a vector layer, every stroke on it). Handy as the first step of "flip / rotate / move this entire drawing".

A selection confines painting: with one active, brush / eraser / fill / gradient only affect the area inside it — so you can shade within a shape without spilling out. The selection stays put when you switch to a paint tool; Esc clears it.

Once you have a selection:

• Drag inside it (or use arrow keys) to move the pixels.
• The action bar gives you rotate, flip, copy, cut, clear, and place.
• Ctrl+C / Ctrl+X / Ctrl+V copy/cut/paste — and paste works onto any frame or layer, even a new project.
• Enter or click outside commits; Esc cancels.

In freeform, a lifted selection becomes a free-transform box: grab the corner/edge handles to scale (Shift keeps aspect), and the knob above it to rotate freely (Shift snaps to 15°). Pixel-mode transforms stay at exact 90° steps so pixel art never gets resampled.

On a vector layer, tapping a stroke selects that whole stroke and shows its control points for editing (see §8).

7ASymmetry (mirrored painting) & flip

Symmetry mirrors what you paint across an axis, live as you draw — the far side appears under your cursor as you go, not when you let go. It's the fastest way to draw faces, characters, wings, mandalas, UI icons, tiles and anything else with a mirror line.

It isn't a tool in the toolbar — it's a mode that rides on whatever tool you're holding. Open its panel with Panels → "Symmetry" (or press Shift+Y, or use the button on the tool panel):

1. Tick Vertical axis ↔ to mirror left↔right, and/or Horizontal axis ↕ to mirror top↔bottom. Tick both for 4-way symmetry (one stroke, four marks).
2. Draw. Whatever you paint on one side appears mirrored on the other.

Where the axis lands. Ticking an axis drops it down the middle of your current selection if you have one — select the area you want to work in, then tick the axis to mirror down its centre. With nothing selected, it goes down the canvas centre.

The axis then stays where you put it and outlives the selection. Deselect and you can keep painting across the whole canvas, still mirrored. This is deliberate: the selection places the axis, it doesn't own it.

• The number box beside each axis moves it exactly (in pixels from the left / top edge). Half-pixel values are normal and fine.
• Centre re-places the live axes on the current selection (or the canvas).
• Off turns both axes off.
• A dashed blue line on the canvas shows each live axis.

Good to know:

• It works in both pixel and freeform projects, and on vector layers (where the mirrored stroke becomes a real, editable second stroke).
• The eraser mirrors too — so you can clean up symmetrically, not just paint.
• One stroke is one undo, mirrors included. Ctrl+Z takes back all of it.
• Smudge is deliberately not mirrored: it pushes paint that's already on the layer around rather than laying down new ink, so there's nothing to mirror.
• The axis is saved with the project, so it's still there next time you open it — including after a crash recovery.

Flipping

Separate from live symmetry, you can flip a drawing that already exists:

• A selection — select something (Ctrl+A for everything) and use the ⇄ / ⇅ buttons on the select bar.
• A whole layer — the ⇄ / ⇅ buttons in the Layers panel footer flip the active layer's drawing on the current frame, no selection needed.

Both are a single undo step. Text layers refuse to flip — the lettering would come out backwards.

8Vector drawing (freeform)

Freeform projects can hold vector layers — real editable paths, not pixels. Add one with the + button's Layer/Vector picker.

• Pen (in the toolbar) — click to place anchor points; click-drag to pull out smooth curve handles; click the first anchor to close a shape. Right-click or Esc finishes the path. Click on an existing path to insert an anchor. Double-click an anchor (with Select) to switch it smooth ↔ corner.
• Shape — drag out rectangles, ellipses, polygons, or stars that stay live-editable by their parameters. Shift = square/regular, Alt = from center.
• Vector strokes stay crisp at any zoom, can be smoothed/simplified, and export as true paths to SVG and PDF.
• With one stroke selected you get its style bar: caps, joins, dashes, fill, taper/width profile, and Smooth / Simplify.

You can rasterize a vector layer (turn its strokes into plain pixels) with the ✎→▦ button — one-way, so keep a copy if unsure.

8AText (freeform)

The Text tool (T) adds real, editable type — titles, captions, speech bubbles, UI mockups. Click on the canvas to drop a text box and start typing. The words stay live: pick the Text tool again and click the type to edit it, change the wording, or restyle it. One layer can hold several separate text blocks.

Re-tap the tool to open the Text panel (its floating settings):

• Font, size, bold / italic, alignment, and line height.
• Color comes from the normal color picker.
• Rotation — a numeric field, or grab the box handles around a block: the knob rotates (Shift snaps to 15°) and the corners resize the font.

With the Text tool, a single click selects a block (showing its box), and clicking again opens it for editing; dragging a block moves it. Text inherits layer transforms, the camera, and rigging like anything else, and exports as real, selectable <text> in SVG.

8BFilling vector line art (the paint bucket)

Pick the Fill tool (G) and click inside an area of a vector layer. The colour goes on and — this is the part that matters for animation — it stays attached to the line. Redraw the line, drag a node, scale the drawing, and the fill reshapes itself to match. You never re-fill after an edit.

What to use it for

• Flat-colouring line art frame by frame. The main one: on a 12-drawing walk cycle the fills follow every redraw, so you colour once instead of once per frame.
• Blocking in a silhouette while you're still finding the shape.
• Filling a shape you drew with the Pen or Shape tool.

A fill usually becomes part of the line

When one stroke already describes the area you clicked in, the bucket colours that stroke. The line and its colour become one object — select it and you get one selection, not two; move it, deform it with a bone or a mesh, save it, export it, and the colour travels with the line, because it is the line.

That also makes it exact. The colour reaches the middle of the brush stroke and the line paints over the top, so there is no pale hairline between them and no jagged edge, however far you zoom in.

You don't have to close the loop — or close it at the ends

Hand-drawn loops are never perfect. Enkava looks for the two closest parts of the line and fills between them, which covers the three ways people actually draw:

1. You crossed over your own line. The commonest one: you go round and overshoot past where you started, leaving a little tail. The fill uses the crossing point, so the tail stays outside the colour.
2. The loop is in the middle of a longer stroke. Draw a "P" in one go — a stem, a loop and a run-out — and clicking inside the loop fills only the loop. The stem and the run-out stay uncoloured.
3. You left a gap. If the two ends never meet, the closest two points are used instead and the fill closes straight across.

For ⑶ the judgement is relative, not a pixel count: a gap is "closed enough" when it is small compared with the loop it closes. A big circle left slightly open fills; a small one with the same size gap does not — the same call you'd make by eye. Nothing to set, and it behaves the same however far you're zoomed in or how large you drew.

When Enkava closes across a gap, expect a straight edge there. There's no line drawn across the opening, so the colour simply ends in a straight line. That's the fill showing you where your outline is still open — close the line and it disappears.

When it can't use one stroke

If the area is enclosed by several separate strokes — a box drawn as four strokes, say — no single stroke describes it, so Enkava traces the region and adds a separate colour shape underneath the line art. It's still live (it follows the lines when you redraw them), it just isn't part of any one stroke. Two controls tune that case, in the tool's settings row:

• Close gaps — how many pixels of leak-proofing to apply. Raise it if colour escapes through a gap between strokes.
• Hole buffer — holes this size or smaller get coloured over. Useful for speckly or hatched line art.

Both are remembered between sessions, and each fill keeps its own copy of them, so changing the sliders never disturbs fills you already made.

Things worth knowing

• Click an already-filled area again to recolour it. Right-click removes a fill.
• A colour always sits under the line art, never over it.
• One stroke holds one fill. If a single stroke encloses two separate pockets, filling the second leaves the first alone and traces the second instead.
• Break the loop open and the colour disappears but is not lost — close the line again and it comes straight back.
• The Fill swatch on the selection bar is unchanged and still fills a whole selected shape; the bucket is for clicking into an area.

9Layers, groups & blend modes

The Layers panel (top-right) manages layers for the whole project — every frame has the same layer stack. A project can hold up to 48 layers.

• The eye checkbox shows/hides a layer.
• Click to select, double-click to rename, drag to reorder.
• Right-click a layer or folder — or press and hold it on a touch screen — for its menu: Rename, Duplicate, Copy to frames, and Delete, plus Ungroup on a folder. Duplicating a folder copies everything inside it — and if the folder holds a rigged character, it copies the skeleton too, so the copy is a separate character you can move and pose on its own. (A skeleton that also drives layers outside the folder stays shared, and the app tells you so.) A duplicate brings the whole layer with it — mask, clipping, animation and bone binding — and a held drawing stays held.
• Folders can move. Select a folder and pick the Select tool: a box appears around the folder's art. Drag inside it to move the folder, drag a corner or edge to scale it, or drag the round knob to rotate it (Shift keeps a move on one axis, or turns in 15° steps). The transform bar (Sheet → Layer) does the same with typed numbers and can fade it too. Either way everything inside moves as one piece, and it keys over time like a layer: once a folder is animated it gets its own Transform row in the dope sheet, under the folder's name, where its keys can be dragged, copied, pasted and double-clicked like any other. A folder turns about the centre of its own art. A rigged character moves with its skeleton: the first time you move a folder, it takes over the rig that drives its layers, so the bones come along and the animation plays exactly as before, just somewhere else. If that rig also drives something outside the folder (a sword held in a Props folder, say), choose the folder yourself with Moves with in the Bone panel — anything bound to the rig then goes where its bones go. Ungrouping a moved folder, or dragging a layer into or out of one, leaves the art where it is: the folder's movement passes to what was inside it (and its skeleton to the folder above). When that can't be exact — the folder is animated, or it's scaled and carries a skeleton — the app asks first and says why.
• Copy to frames… puts what a layer has on the current frame onto other frames — draw a hat once, then put it on every frame. Choose all other frames, from here to the end, the loop range, or pick frames (Shift+click picks a run); the chosen frames light up in the frame strip. Where a frame already has art on that layer you can add on top (the default — nothing is lost), replace it, or skip that frame. With a selection up, only the selected part is copied. The copies are separate drawings you can edit one by one — or choose The same drawing and the frames all show this one drawing, so changing it once changes every frame (that works for the frames straight after this one, like a hold). Either way, one Undo takes the whole thing back. On a folder it copies every layer inside.
• Footer buttons: duplicate, delete, move up/down, group, ungroup, rasterize, flip (⇄ / ⇅ — see §7A), hold (≡), and bind-to-bone (🦴 — see Rigging).
• Each row shows a thumbnail of that layer on the current frame.

Row marks. A row tells you what the layer is and what's moving it:

• ⦿ spine — this layer follows the bone named "spine". Click the chip to select that bone (the transform bar, skeleton and dope sheet all follow it). A long bone name is shortened; hover the chip for the full one.
• ▦ — this layer is deformed by a mesh (see §14.4). It can appear on its own, because a mesh needs no rig at all.
• V — a vector layer. ≡ — held on this frame (see §11).
• 50% / M / 🔒 — non-default opacity, blend mode, and alpha lock.

Hide the bone chips with View → "Bone bindings on layers".

Per layer you can set:

• Opacity (slider).
• Blend mode — the full set of 16 (Multiply, Screen, Overlay, Darken, Lighten, Color Dodge/Burn, Hard/Soft Light, Difference, Exclusion, Hue, Saturation, Color, Luminosity, and Normal), grouped by family in the dropdown.
• Alpha lock (🔒) — paint only lands where the layer already has pixels, so you can recolor art without spilling outside its silhouette.

Masks — hide parts of a layer without erasing them:

• A layer mask is a paintable alpha channel on the layer. Add one from the layers panel, then paint the mask: erasing hides the artwork and painting reveals it, all non-destructively (the art underneath is never touched). One mask is shared by every frame of the layer.
• A clipping mask clips a layer to the shape of the visible layer below it — the standard way to shade or add detail inside an existing silhouette.

Groups: put layers in a folder to organize them; a group can have its own opacity and blend mode, and composites in isolation. Groups can nest, and you drag layers in and out in the panel.

Switch groups — one drawing at a time

A switch group shows only one of the layers inside it on each frame, and which one is keyed down the timeline: mouth shapes, hand poses, a head drawn from three angles, a blink.

• Select a group and press the 🗘 button in the layers footer to make it a switch (press again to make it an ordinary group). With a layer selected, the same button wraps that layer in a new switch group — then drag the other drawings in.
• With the switch selected, the Shows row picks the drawing for the current frame. Choosing one keys it here; later frames follow until the next key. ◀ / ▶ step through the drawings, ✕ key removes this frame's key.
• + drawing adds another layer to the switch, already held across every frame, so you draw it once and it's there wherever it's chosen.
• The switch's keys get their own row in the dope sheet, where they drag, copy and paste like any other key.
• The + button → Mouth set… makes a ready-made switch for lip sync, with one empty, named layer per mouth shape (see §16.1).

9ASymbols — draw once, use everywhere

A symbol is a drawing (or a whole little animation) you can place as many times as you like. Every copy is linked: edit the symbol once and every copy updates. A crowd of one character, a tree repeated across a background, a walk cycle used by five extras.

Open the Symbols panel with the ◈ button in the Layers header (or Panels → Symbols).

• New from layer turns the selected layer — or a selected folder — into a symbol. The picture doesn't change: it becomes a placement of the new symbol, sitting exactly where the art was. A folder goes in whole, with the folders inside it, its own animation and any switch (a mouth set stays a mouth set).
• Rigged art keeps its skeleton. If the layers follow bones, the whole connected rig goes into the symbol with them — the bones, their animation, IK goals, Follows controllers and smart dials, plus any Actions that only move that rig. If a layer staying in the project still uses some of those bones (a sword in the character's hand), the symbol gets its own copy of the skeleton and the project keeps the original. You're told which before anything changes.
• + on a symbol's row places another copy on a new layer.
• ✎ (or Edit symbol under the layers) opens the symbol in its own tab above the canvas. Draw, add frames, animate — then Back to project. Every copy shows the change.
• ⭳ exports a symbol to a file; Import… brings one in from a file (or from any Enkava project file, whose whole drawing becomes a symbol). An import is a copy — editing it here doesn't change the file.
• Double-click a symbol's name to rename it; 🗑 deletes it.

Each placement is a layer with its own clock, shown under the layers when it's selected: Offset starts its animation some frames later, Speed plays it faster or slower, and Loop repeats it when the symbol is shorter than your timeline. That's what stops twenty copies of one cycle moving in lockstep.

Move, scale or rotate a placement with the Select tool: a blue box with handles appears around it. It keys like any layer transform, so it can animate.

My library (Pro)

My library keeps symbols in your account instead of in one project — save a character or a prop once, and place it in any project, on any device, while you're signed in.

• 📚 on a symbol's row in the Symbols panel saves it to My library. If something with the same name is already there, you're asked: OK replaces it, Cancel keeps both.
• Open My library with 📚 Open My library in the Symbols panel, Panels → My library, or Shift+L. It's a panel of its own: drag its header to move it and its corners to resize it — the grid of thumbnails reflows to fit. ☰ switches to a compact list.
• Double-click a symbol (or press Place) to put a copy on the canvas, centred. Or drag it onto the canvas to place it exactly where you drop it. On a touch screen, tap Place.
• ⋯ on a symbol (or right-click, or press and hold on a touch screen) has the rest: Add to project only (into the Symbols panel, without placing it), Rename, and Delete — copies already in projects stay.
• Search by name and sort by Recently saved, Name or Largest first. The bar at the bottom shows how much of your cloud storage is used.
• What you place is a copy: editing it in the project doesn't change My library.

Each symbol in My library can be up to 25 MB, and My library counts toward your Pro cloud storage.

10Animation basics

The frame bar at the bottom holds your frames.

• Add frame — N (or the + button).
• Duplicate frame — D. (Duplicate, then nudge — the classic workflow.)
• Delete frame — Delete (with nothing selected), or the trash button.
• Switch frames — , (previous) and . (next).
• Reorder — drag a frame's thumbnail along the strip and drop it where you want it; a blue line shows the slot it will land in. Dragging near either end scrolls the strip. On a touchscreen, press and hold a thumbnail for a moment before dragging — a plain swipe scrolls the strip instead.

Reordering re-times everything keyed to those frames — layer tweens, the camera and bone poses all travel with the frame that moved.

Onion skin — see neighboring frames as colored ghosts so you can line up motion. Toggle the prev/next ghosts (O toggles prev), and open Onion… to set how many ghosts, their opacity, and their tint colors (Procreate-style).

Origin guides — press X for a crosshair through the canvas center ("are the feet still on this line?").

Preview & playback — press P (or Play) to play the animation right in the canvas; set the FPS in the frame bar. There's also a pop-out preview panel. Click the canvas while playing to pause and jump to the frame that was showing.

11The animation panel (dope sheet)

Open it with the ▾ Sheet button in the frame bar. You get a grid: one row per layer, one column per frame. Drag the panel's top edge to resize it.

Above the grid is a tab strip, because the panel does five different jobs:

• Layer — the selected layer's transform on this frame (§12).
• Camera — the project-wide camera track (§13).
• Bone — the selected bone: rig setup, and painting mesh weights (§14).
• Actions — reusable animation clips, and overlays that play one on top of your animation (§15).
• Audio — voices and their sound clips, and Lip sync… (§16).

The tab follows what you're doing: picking up the Bone tool or selecting a bone switches to the Bone tab. Clicking a tab yourself always wins.

Per-layer timing (holds)

Real animation isn't one global speed — different layers move at different rates. Enkava does this with per-layer exposure, shown in the grid.

• A solid block = a drawing starts on that frame.
• A connecting bar = the drawing is held (reused from the previous frame).
• Click a cell to jump to that frame + layer.
• Double-click a cell to toggle a hold.

Holds let one layer stay still ("on twos" or "on threes") while another keeps moving ("on ones") — the defining move for lip sync and limited animation.

• + Hold (Shift+N) adds a fully-held frame (shoot on twos in one click).
• The ≡ button in the layers panel (Shift+H) holds/unholds just the active layer on the current frame.

A held cell costs nothing — it reuses the previous drawing, so editing that drawing updates every frame that shows it.

Non-layer lanes sit at the top of the grid: the audio waveform, the camera track, a "Rig" header with one lane per bone, and a mesh lane for any layer whose mesh points are animated (§14.4).

Retiming — editing keys in the sheet

Keyframes are diamonds in the grid, and you can move them around directly instead of unkeying and re-posing. Use it for the everyday job of fixing timing after the fact: an action that lands too early, a pose you want to hold two frames longer, a gesture you want to reuse further down the timeline.

• Click a key to select it. Ctrl+click adds or removes one. Shift+click selects the run between. Drag on empty grid to rubber-band a block of keys.
• Drag the selection sideways to retime it. Crossing over another key doesn't destroy it — only where you let go counts. One drag = one undo.
• Delete removes the selected keys. (With keys selected, Delete removes the keys, not the bone.) On a touchscreen, the 🗑 at the end of the sheet's tab strip does the same. Esc deselects.
• Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V copy and paste keys, including onto a different lane. Layer and bone lanes interchange freely; camera and mesh paste only onto their own kind.
• Ctrl+Shift+V pastes the movement instead of the pose. An ordinary paste puts the copied positions back exactly as they were; a relative paste keeps only the change between them and lays it on top of wherever the target already is. So a walk cycle copied from a character standing on the left replays on a character standing anywhere else, and a bone's keys can be dropped onto the next bone a few frames later for follow-through. Position and rotation are carried across; scale and alpha paste as they were copied. Layer and bone lanes only.
• Ctrl+drag from the last key of a run to scale that run — speed a whole action up or slow it down without re-posing anything.

Undo covers all of it, including the ◆ Key / ✕ / Clear buttons.

Play range and markers

• The gold brackets on the frame strip set an in and out point, and playback loops just that range — the way you polish one action without watching the whole shot. Drag them, or press Shift+I / Shift+O to set them at the playhead. "Clear loop" (or \) drops back to the whole timeline. Audio plays the matching slice, in sync.
• + Mark drops a named flag on the current frame — beats, hits, the frame a door slams. Click a flag to jump there; hover it and click the × to delete. Flags re-time themselves when you insert or delete frames.

Curves — seeing the motion

The Keys / Curves switch at the right of the sheet's tab strip shows the same timeline as motion curves: each animated channel as a line over time, with the frame ruler above unchanged.

• It shows the layer, bone or folder you're working on (the camera on the Camera tab) — plus every lane you have selected keys on, overlaid. Colour is the channel (X red, Y green, rotation yellow…); a dashed line is a second object.
• The list on the left turns channels on and off. The channels you've actually animated show at first — even after a single key, as a flat line with its diamond (key another frame and it becomes a curve); ones still at rest start hidden.
• Too many curves? Click an object's 👁 row to take all of its curves off the chart (the row dims and folds; click again to bring them back). This only, at the start of the curve tools, shows just what you're working on; Show all in the list brings the rest back. A key drag only moves keys on curves you can see.
• Hover a curve or key to see whose it is — for example Head · X — 60 on frame 9. On a touch screen, tap it.
• Values read as the bars show them: rotation in degrees, scale and alpha in percent.
• Click a key on a curve to select it — the same selection as the Keys view — and a selected key shows its handles: the shape of the curve leaving and arriving. Click anywhere else to go to that frame.

Editing on the curves

• Drag a key up or down to change that channel's value; sideways to move the key in time (all its channels move together, as in the Keys view). Every selected key comes along. Shift holds the drag to one direction.
• Drag a handle to shape the curve. That channel becomes a Bezier on that key; the handle on the other side turns to stay in line, so the motion flows through the key. Hold Alt to move one handle alone — for a sharp change of direction, like a bounce.
• For a bounce you don't have to shape by hand, give just that channel a Bounce or Elastic ease from the right-click menu — a ball can bounce on Y while X glides evenly across the frame.
• Right-click a key to choose that channel's ease: linear, ease in/out, smooth, step (hold), Bezier, or a Bounce / Elastic spring (grouped at the bottom of the menu). Only that channel changes — position can glide while rotation snaps. Same as the key goes back to the key's ease. Choosing Bezier starts from the curve exactly as it was (for an ease in-out, from the nearest shape), so nothing moves until you drag a handle.
• Each drag, and each ease change, is one Ctrl+Z.
• Hold Ctrl while dragging a key to snap its value to whole numbers (whole degrees, pixels or percent).

It's the ◆ keys and the round handles you grab — not the line between them. A key under the mouse gets a ring and the cursor changes.

Getting a good look

• Fit shows every curve whole; Fit sel zooms in on the selected keys and their handles.
• Ctrl+wheel over the curves zooms the values in and out around the pointer (or − / +). A plain wheel scrolls the sheet as usual.
• Middle-drag, or Alt+drag on empty space, slides the values up and down.
• Picking different lanes goes back to fitting automatically.

The curve tools — and touch screens

In Curves view a row of tools appears beside the tabs. Every keyboard or right-click trick has one, so all of it works on a tablet with just a finger:

Keys and handles are also easier to hit with a finger than with the mouse.

Mesh points on the curves

An animated mesh (§14.4) has a curve for every point — far too many to show at once — so you choose which:

• With the Mesh tool, tap a point to pick it (a ring appears in its colour); tap it again to unpick it. A point you drag is picked automatically. Clear picked points in the Mesh panel unpicks them all.
• The Curves view then shows each picked point's X (solid) and Y (dashed), in that point's colour, and everything above works on them: drag keys, shape handles, give one point its own ease.
• Y is measured downward, as in the app's Y field: a point that rises on the canvas has a curve that goes below zero.

12Tweening — animating a layer's transform

You can animate a layer's position, depth, rotation, scale, and opacity over time without redrawing it. The drawing itself never changes — only how it's placed.

On the Layer tab, with a layer selected:

1. Go to the frame where the motion should start.
2. Type values into X / Y / Z / Rot / Scale / Alpha — this auto-keys the layer on that frame (a diamond appears in its Transform row).
3. Go to a later frame and set different values → a second key.
4. The layer smoothly interpolates between the keys.

• Z is depth — how far the layer sits along the camera axis. 0 is the action plane; positive pushes it away (it shrinks and moves less under a camera move), negative brings it nearer. This is what produces parallax; see §13.
• Ease sets how a key blends into the next one. The menu is grouped: Basic — Linear, Smooth (flows through the pose instead of braking to a stop at it — the natural choice for continuous motion) and Step (holds the value until the next key, for snappy constant-interpolation animation); Ease — in, out, in-out; Bounce and Elastic (see below); and Looping — Cycle and Cycle + travel.
• Bounce and Elastic are the two springy eases, each in three directions.
  • Bounce lands and hops, in diminishing hops, like a dropped ball. Bounce out — hopping as it arrives — is the one you'll want nearly every time.
  • Elastic overshoots the target and wobbles back to it, like a rubber band. Elastic out overshoots on arrival; Elastic in winds up backwards before springing away.
  • in means springy as the move leaves this key, out as it arrives at the next one, and in-out at both ends.
  • They ignore a neighbouring Smooth key and always run their own shape — so a bounce always bounces, whatever sits next to it. Open the Curves view to watch the hops and the wobble as an actual line.
  • Elastic deliberately goes past the value you keyed. On position and rotation that overshoot is the whole effect and is kept. On alpha and scale it is held inside their limits instead, so a fade can't go more than fully opaque and art can't flip inside out.
  • The shapes are fixed — you time the feel by moving the keys further apart or closer together.
• Cycle — on the last key, this repeats an earlier span forever instead of holding. A "from" box beside it names the frame to loop back to, so you animate one cycle and it runs for the whole shot.
  • Cycle repeats in place — a blink, a flapping flag, a spinning wheel.
  • Cycle + travel carries the loop's movement forward each time round, so a walk cycle crosses the screen instead of moonwalking on the spot.
  It works the same on layer transforms, bones, the camera and mesh points.
• ◆ Key pins the current pose without changing it.
• ✕ removes this frame's key; Clear removes all of the layer's keys.

You can keep painting on a tweened layer — strokes are mapped back into the layer's own space, so they land under your cursor (see §4).

13The camera, and depth

The camera is a single, project-wide move that reframes the whole scene — great for a push-in, a pan across, or a shake. It's a non-layer track: it lives on its own lane in the dope sheet, not on any layer.

Open the Camera tab.

1. Go to a frame and set X / Y (pan), Dolly, Zoom (%), or Rot — this starts the camera and auto-keys it on that frame.
2. Set different values on a later frame → the camera moves between them, with the same easing options as tweens.
3. ◆ Key / ✕ / Clear work just like the transform bar.

Dolly vs zoom — the difference that matters

• Zoom is the lens. It magnifies everything equally, so the shot gets bigger but stays flat.
• Dolly moves the camera itself through the scene. Near layers swell faster than far ones, so the shot gains real depth as you move.

They only differ if your layers have depth. Give layers different Z values (§12) — background positive, foreground negative — and a dolly or a pan will separate them: near art sweeps past while distant art barely shifts. That's parallax, and it's the whole reason Z exists.

• Lens (on the camera bar, after the key buttons) sets perspective strength for the whole project — it is not animated. Lower is a wider lens and stronger parallax; higher flattens toward no perspective at all.

While you're editing, the canvas keeps showing the whole scene at rest, with a dashed blue rectangle marking what the camera currently frames — so you can set up a move without your drawing jumping around. When you play (or export), you see through the camera. The pop-out Preview panel also shows the camera live while you're stopped, which is the easiest way to judge a depth move.

The camera applies to every animated export (GIF, APNG, video, WebM) and the sprite sheet / atlas too.

14Rigging with bones (and deforming without them)

Bones let you pose artwork without redrawing it — build a skeleton, bind your layers to bones, then move the bones to animate.

If you only want to squash and stretch a drawing, skip ahead to §14.4: a mesh needs no rig, and dragging its points is a tool of its own (Shift+M). Bones and meshes work together, but neither requires the other.

14.1The basic workflow

A) Draw your parts on separate layers. Put each movable piece on its own layer — upper arm, forearm, head, torso, etc. A piece that needs to move independently needs its own layer.

B) Build the skeleton. Select the Bone tool (K).

• Drag on empty canvas to draw a bone: press at the joint, release at the tip. You'll see the skeleton as orange segments with a ring at each joint and a knob at each tip.
• To chain a child bone (e.g. forearm off the upper arm): with a bone selected, drag again — the new bone attaches to the selected bone's tip and becomes its child. Chain shoulder → elbow → wrist this way.
• Click a bone to select it (it turns green). Esc deselects.
• Delete removes the selected bone and everything chained below it. With no keyboard (a tablet), use 🗑 Delete bone in the Bone panel — it reads Delete pin when a pin is selected.
• Ctrl+Z undoes rig work like anything else — one gesture is one undo, so an IK drag that swung five bones is taken back in one press. Merely selecting a bone is not an edit.

B2) Which way to draw — the one that catches everybody. A bone rotates about its joint: the end you pressed at. Not its middle, not its tip. So the joint has to sit where you want the pivot to be.

• Always draw a bone outward from the joint it should pivot on. A head bone starts at the neck and drags up to the crown. Draw it the other way — crown down to neck — and the head swings from the top of the skull, as if the character were hanging from it.
• Root the skeleton at the hips or chest, not the head. A chained bone attaches to its parent's tip, so starting at the head and working down leaves everything hanging off the crown, and the whole character animates slightly ragdolled.

A build order that works for most characters: hips (root) → spine drawn upward to the neck → head drawn upward from the neck → arms drawn outward from each shoulder → legs drawn downward from the hips.

The Bone panel — where rig setup lives

Picking up the Bone tool opens a floating Bone panel, and it stays open while you work with it — pick a different tool and it steps aside, returning as you left it when you come back. Everything that sets up a bone is there: angle limits, independent angle, aim-at, Follows, IK goals, dynamics, smart bones, weight painting, bone strength, and the rest-pose controls below. Things that animate a bone — Stretch, Girth, Keep volume — stay on the Bone bar next to the timeline their keys land on.

• Edit rest pose — the fix for a bone drawn the wrong way round, or a joint in slightly the wrong place. Tick it and the skeleton shows at rest in blue; now drag a bone to move its joint, or drag its tip to re-aim and re-lengthen it. X / Y / Angle / Len take exact numbers, and nothing is keyed. Poses you already animated are deliberately left alone: a pose is an angle relative to rest, so moving a head bone's joint from the crown to the neck makes every posed frame rotate about the neck instead — which is exactly the repair. The artwork doesn't move at rest. Do this on a frame where the rig is at rest if you can: on a posed frame the skeleton shows at rest while the artwork stays posed, so you'd be placing a joint against a drawing that's bent somewhere else. Enkava warns you.
• Parent — re-hang a bone under a different one without anything jumping. It refuses choices that would make a loop.
• Branch from click — normally a chained bone attaches to its parent's tip. Tick this and the new bone's joint lands where you start the drag instead, so two chains can leave the same joint — both legs from the hips, or a tail and a spine from the same vertebra. Off by default.
• Edit strength — sizes how far each bone's influence reaches over a meshed layer. It works like Edit rest pose: a mode, with the skeleton shown at rest, in which dragging resizes a region instead of posing. See §14.4.
• + Add pin — drops a pin: a one-point bone with no length that reshapes the meshed artwork around it, with or without a skeleton. Use it to squash a cheek, tug a sleeve or bend a tail without building a chain for it. It lands in the middle of your view (nudged clear of anything already there). Position it with Move bones, drag it to rotate the art around it, or scale it from the Bone bar's Stretch and Girth. Its influence radius is set for you and is adjustable like any bone's, under Edit strength.
• Move bones — normally a drag rotates a bone, because that is what posing a rig mostly is. Tick this and a drag moves it instead: it keys on the current frame like any other pose, its children come with it, and Shift keeps the move straight across the canvas. This is also how you move an IK goal, which is a bone with no parent and so has nothing to rotate about.
• 🔀 Switch bone — makes the selected bone a switch: only one of its child branches is live at a time, keyed down the timeline. Rig a head three ways (front, ¾, profile) or a hand in two perspectives, each as a branch under one switch bone. The bones of the other branches hide and stop driving anything (art bound to them sits at rest), so pair a switch bone with a switch group holding each view's drawing, keyed on the same frames. With the switch bone selected, the Shows row under the layers picks the live branch on this frame, exactly as for a switch group. (Moho calls these Vitruvian bones.)
• Moves with — which folder carries this bone's skeleton when the folder is moved (§9). Usually set for you; pick it yourself when a rig also drives art in another folder.
• Shy (hide on canvas) — hides the selected bone so it stops getting in the way when you are trying to grab the ones underneath it. On a dense rig this is the difference between picking a finger and picking the arm behind it. Show shy bones (Shift+B) brings them all back at once, without un-shying anything.

C) Bind each layer to a bone.

• Select the layer in the Layers panel.
• Select the bone it should follow (Bone tool).
• Click the 🦴 button in the Layers-panel footer. The row now shows "⦿ <bone>". Click again to unbind.
• Bind while the rig is at rest — the art won't jump.

D) Pose. Still in the Bone tool.

What the parts of a bone do

A bone is drawn as a tapered kite: wide at the joint it pivots around, narrowing to a point at the far end. Where you grab it decides what the drag does, and there are three targets.

   ●   . . . .  JOINT RING (the head). The bone pivots about this
   |            point. It does not move when you rotate the bone.
   |
   |   . . . .  BODY. Drag anywhere along here to SWING this bone
   |            alone, about its joint. This is FK.
   |
---+---  . . .  The dashed RUNG. Past this line you are on the TIP.
   |
   ◉  ✦  . . .  TIP KNOB — drag to pull the whole two-bone chain to
                your cursor; the joint above works itself out. IK.
                BLUE NODE — drag to SQUASH and STRETCH (D2 below).

• The rung is there so you can see which of the two a drag will do before you commit to it. Grabbing an inch too low used to bend the whole limb when you meant to swing one bone.
• It appears only on bones that have a parent. A root bone has no chain to solve, so past the rung it still just swings — there is no fork to mark, and a root always swings whatever you grab.
• The tip zone is measured in screen pixels and grows with the bone's on-screen length up to a limit, so the rung shifts as you zoom in and out. It always leaves at least two thirds of the bone rotatable, so a short bone never becomes all tip.
• Where two bones meet, the joint belongs to the parent's tip. The parent's tip knob and the child's joint ring sit on the very same point, so a press there grabs the chain. To swing the child instead, grab it further along its body — the bigger target anyway.
• Bound layers move with the bone, and children follow their parents up the chain.
• Every pose auto-keys on the current frame — so posing across frames builds the animation. Pose on frame 1, pose differently on frame 5, and the rig tweens between them.
• You can also type exact pose values into the Layer tab: when a bone is selected that bar edits the bone (its label turns green and reads the bone's name).

D2) Squash and stretch. A bone can change length, not just angle — which is where cartoon weight comes from: the crouch before a jump, the stretch on a fast arm, the compress on landing.

How to squash or stretch a bone

1. Select the bone — click it with the Bone tool. A blue node appears just to one side of its tip, joined to the tip by a faint dashed line so you can tell which bone it belongs to. Nothing appears on the other bones, so a big rig doesn't fill up with handles.
2. Drag that node along the bone's own direction. Pulling away from the joint stretches it; pushing back toward the joint squashes it.
3. Let go. The change keys on the current frame like any other pose, so stretching on one frame and not the next gives you the animation.

• Only movement along the bone's length counts — dragging sideways does nothing on its own. The stretch tracks the bone rather than your exact cursor path, so you can't skew it by wandering off the line.
• The bone scales about its joint, so the joint stays put and the tip moves. Children sitting on that tip are carried out to the new tip — but they keep their own shape and size, and still turn in a true circle. Only the stretched bone (and the art bound to it) stretches.
• If the node happens to sit on top of another bone, pressing there grabs that bone, not the node. The node only takes a press on empty canvas, so you can't stretch a bone by accident while reaching for its neighbour.
• Shift + drag the tip is the same gesture, if you prefer the keyboard. The blue node exists because there is no Shift key on a touchscreen — on a tablet it's the only way to reach this.
• Or type exact numbers in the Bone bar: Stretch is length along the bone, Girth is thickness across it. The range is ¼× to 4×.
• Keep volume (on by default) ties the two together: stretching thins the bone across, squashing thickens it. That trade is what reads as weight — without it a stretch mostly just looks like the art got bigger. Turn it off to set length and thickness independently.
• Like every other pose it auto-keys on the current frame, so it animates.
• Children on the tip move with the stretch, so a limb never comes apart — and it works with meshes and weight painting exactly as it works with rigidly bound art.
• Projects made before this behaviour existed keep the old one, where a stretched bone also stretched and bent everything below it, so their animation plays exactly as it was made. You'll see Stretch bends children ticked in the Bone panel; untick it to move the project to the new behaviour (one Ctrl+Z takes it back). You can tick it on a new project too, if you want that look.

E) See it on the timeline. Each bone gets a lane under a "Rig" header, one diamond per pose key. Click a lane to select that bone; double-click a cell to add/remove a key.

14.2Rig setup — constraints

Open the Bone tab and click "Rig setup…". These are rig properties: they hold on every frame rather than being keyframed, which is why they live behind a button instead of among the per-frame fields. The bar shows a one-line summary of whatever is active.

• Angle limit — stop the bone rotating past a Min/Max. Applied last, so a limit overrides everything below and IK respects it too. Knees don't bend backwards.
• Independent angle — hold this bone's own world angle no matter what its parents do. This is how a head stays upright, or a foot stays flat, while the body moves under it.
• Aim at — point this bone at another bone, continuously. Move the target and this bone tracks it (eyes, a gun barrel, a spotlight). Bones that would create a loop aren't offered.
• Dynamics (springy lag) — secondary motion for tails, hair, ears and cloth: the bone lags behind what its parent does and settles. Stiff is how hard it snaps back; Damp is how fast the wobble dies. It's simulated from frame 1 every time, so scrubbing, playback and exports always agree.
• Drives clip (smart bones) — make this bone a dial: rotating it scrubs a recorded Action (§15), so every bone that clip touches poses itself to match. Set From° / To° for the rotations that play the clip's start and end. One dial can drive a whole hand-closing or head-turn. Clips that would drive the dial back aren't offered.
• Follows — this bone copies another bone's movement. Pick the bone to follow, tick Rotation, Position and/or Scale, and give each one a percentage. One hidden "eyes" bone can move both pupils; one "hand" bone can curl every finger; −100% makes a mirrored twin. Bones that would create a loop aren't offered. See below.

More on Follows. What gets copied is how far the other bone has moved away from its own rest pose — not where it is. That matters, because it means the follower keeps its own keyframes: the follow is added on top of them, exactly like an overlay or a smart bone. A controller sitting still contributes nothing, so a fresh link does nothing until you move the bone it follows.

• Percentages go from −300% to 300%, one per channel. 100% matches the controller; 50% does half as much; −100% does the opposite, which is the usual way to mirror a limb; over 100% exaggerates. Because each channel has its own number, one link can mirror rotation while copying position normally.
• Delay makes the bone follow a few frames late — follow-through and overlap you can direct, rather than a simulation you can only nudge. A negative delay leads instead, so the bone moves before the one it follows. A delay only shows if the bone it follows is animated across frames: it works by reading that bone on an earlier frame, so if the controller has a single key its pose is the same on every frame and there is nothing to lag behind. Animate the controller over several frames, then scrub or play. Keep the delay well under the length of your timeline, too — a delay longer than the play range wraps round it, so 200 frames on a 12-frame animation lands somewhere that looks arbitrary rather than late.
• Hold at ends decides what a delay finds when it reaches past the ends of the play range. It is on by default, and that is the safe setting — the bone simply holds the first or last frame. Turn it off only when the bone you follow ends where it starts: the delay then wraps round the range and a looping animation loops seamlessly. Turning it off on an animation that doesn't loop makes the follower leap, because it reads the far end of a motion that never came back.
• Stagger below gives every bone below the selected one the same controller and the same percentages, with the delay growing by Step at each level down. This is how you make a tail, a tentacle, a rope or a row of hair ripple: wire the top bone, press the button once. Branches each ripple down their own length, so a hand's five fingers all work from one press.

A dashed line on the canvas shows the link, with the arrow pointing at the follower. It is drawn only while one end or the other is selected, so a controller driving a dozen bones doesn't cover the canvas in lines.

You can still pose a follower by hand: drag it and it goes where you put it, with the follow riding on top of that pose. Move the controller afterwards and the bone moves the same amount again from wherever you left it.

Follows sits alongside the other constraints rather than overriding them: an angle limit still clamps the result, dynamics still swing with it, and a bone being solved by a live IK goal takes its rotation from the solve (its position still follows).

14.3IK goals — the planted foot

Dragging a tip (14.1 D) is a one-off posing aid. An IK goal is the live version: the bone and its parent continuously solve so the tip sits on a target, every frame. Move the hips and the planted foot stays planted.

In Rig setup…, next to "IK goal":

• Click "+ Create goal" to make a goal bone at this bone's tip and wire it up in one step (or pick an existing bone from the dropdown).
• Now animate the goal bone like any other bone — it's a normal bone, so it keyframes, draws and saves like the rest of the rig.
• Blend mixes the keyed FK pose (0) with the solved IK pose (100). It's keyframable, so a foot can plant and release mid-shot.

Notes: the chain is two bones (the bone and its parent) — which covers arms and legs, i.e. nearly all 2D character IK. Out of reach, the limb straightens and still aims at the target. Angle limits still clamp the result, and a bone driven by IK skips dynamics (a planted foot that springs isn't planted).

14.4Mesh deformation — bending and stretching

A mesh lets a drawing change shape instead of only moving as a whole. Two things drive it, and you can use either or both:

• Bones bend it — an elbow that creases, a tail that curves, cloth that follows a body.
• Your own hands stretch it — grab a point and pull. Squash, stretch, a ripple through a cape, a face that isn't rigid.

The Mesh tool (Shift+M). Pick it from the toolbar or press Shift+M. Its panel opens with it, steps aside when another tool takes over, and returns as you left it (re-tap the tool button to hide or show it). The panel is where a mesh is created and tuned:

• Mesh on this layer — tick it to build a grid over the layer's artwork on this frame. If the layer is empty here there is nothing to build over, and it will say so.
• Nodes — how many points the mesh has along its longer side. The other side follows automatically so the cells stay roughly square. More nodes follow a bend more smoothly and cost more triangles.
• Rebuild — rebuild the mesh over the layer's current art. Painted weights and any point animation are lost, so do this before hand-tuning, not after. (Changing Nodes rebuilds too, and asks first for the same reason.)

Dragging points. With the Mesh tool active, drag any point of the lattice. Neighbouring points follow, so you get a bend rather than a spike. Hold Alt to move one point alone.

The lattice tells you what you have moved: a point at rest is hollow, a point carrying a deformation on this frame is filled orange, and a pinned edge point is dim grey. Each drag is one undo, however long the drag was.

• Reach — how far a drag carries. Rings of nodes counts steps out through the lattice ("2 rings" = the two rings of neighbours around the point you grabbed), which means the same thing however big the art is. Pixels is an absolute distance instead.
• Shape — how the drag fades across the points it reaches. Soft bulges smoothly. Linear arrives at an angle and leaves a crease, which a hard fold sometimes wants. Sharp keeps the movement close to the point you grabbed.
• Pin edge points — holds the mesh's outer ring still, so dragging near the border can't pull the artwork's silhouette out of shape. Pinned points can't be grabbed while this is on.
• Mirror drags — also moves each point's twin across the symmetry axis, using the axes from the Symmetry panel (Shift+Y). Place an axis there first; with no axis set, this does nothing.
• Show lattice / handles — hide the lattice to see the art clean while you work, or set the handle size by hand (0 sizes them to fit the spacing).

Animating a deformation. Every drag keys the current frame. Move the playhead, drag again, and the shape tweens between the two.

• Key frame — pins the mesh's current shape on this frame without dragging anything. Use this on your first frame. Outside the keyed range the nearest key holds, so if your only key is on frame 10 the deformation shows from frame 1 onward and never animates out of rest. A rest key on frame 1 is what makes it move.
• Remove key — drops this frame's key; the shape then comes from the neighbouring keys.
• Ease — how this frame's key eases into the next, the same easing every other animated track offers, bounce and elastic included (a wobbling jelly is a mesh key on Elastic out).
• Reset all points — sends every point home and deletes the mesh's point animation. The mesh and its painted weights survive.

Weighting a mesh to bones. Only needed if bones are driving the mesh. Each mesh point is automatically weighted to the nearest bones when the mesh is built, and those automatic weights are worst exactly where it shows: joints and crossing limbs. Three controls tune them, broadest first.

• Binding (mesh panel) — how this layer's points are shared out among the bones. Flexible lets every bone influence every point, falling off with distance: no setup, and it's what every mesh built before this used — but a lot of overlapping influence is what makes motion look rubbery. Region gives each bone a hard boundary, outside which it has no say at all: cleaner, and what character rigs usually want, at the cost of sizing the regions yourself. It is set per layer, so a rubbery cloth or hair layer and a crisp-limbed body layer can live in one character. Switching visibly changes how strong the bones feel, so expect to re-tune afterwards.
• Edit strength (Bone tool) — how far one bone's influence reaches. Tick it and every bone's influence region is drawn; drag near a bone to pull the edge of its region to your cursor, or type an exact Strength in art pixels. Auto returns to the default, which is derived from the bone's own length, so a fresh rig is sensible without typing anything. The skeleton shows at rest while this is on, because weights are always measured from the rest pose and never from a pose. In Region binding the strength is the boundary; in Flexible it tilts the falloff, which is the fix for a distant bone bleeding into artwork it shouldn't touch.
• Paint weights — on the Bone tab, tick this, select a bone, then left-drag on the canvas to add that bone's influence and right-drag to remove it. A heat map shows the selected bone's influence (blue → red). Size sets the brush. (This one stays on the Bone tab because it's the only mesh control that genuinely needs a bone selected.)

Good to know:

• A mesh changes nothing until something moves it — an unposed rig with no dragged points deforms to nothing, so ticking Mesh is safe.
• Painting artwork is off on a meshed layer while its rig is posed — edit it on a frame where the rig is at rest.
• SVG and PDF export write artwork at rest, so mesh deformation isn't carried into those (raster exports are fine).
• A mesh covers the whole layer's artwork. To deform just a face on a busy drawing, put the face on its own layer and mesh that — the same way the dedicated animation tools do it.

14.5Good to know

• The drawing never moves; only the composite does. A bound layer's thumbnail stays at rest even while the composite shows it posed.
• You can paint on a layer carried by a posed bone — strokes are mapped back into the layer's own space (see §4). Meshed layers are the exception.
• Bones work in both pixel and freeform projects.
• Loops are refused when you wire them: a bone can't aim at, follow, or be driven by, something that depends on it.

15Reusable actions (animation clips)

An Action is a named clip of your rig's animation — a walk cycle, a blink, a wave — that you record once and stamp back onto the timeline as often as you like. Open the Actions tab (it's dimmed until the project has a rig).

To record:

1. Animate the rig over some frames as usual.
2. Set From and To to that frame range.
3. Click ● Record. The clip joins the dropdown.

Recording under the name of a clip you already have asks whether to replace it — the way to fix a clip, since its overlays and smart bones follow (see 15.1). Cancel records a separate clip instead.

It captures the bone poses and the local transform of every bound layer, so secondary motion you added on top of a bone comes along too.

To use:

1. Pick the clip in the dropdown.
2. Set Repeat (how many times it repeats back to back) and Speed (2 = twice as fast).
3. Put the playhead where it should start and click "Insert at playhead". The timeline grows if it needs to.

Easing survives retiming exactly — only frame rounding is approximate.

Deleting a clip leaves stamped placements alone — they were copies. Actions are also what smart bones scrub (see 14.2, "Drives clip").

15.1Overlays — one motion on top of another

Insert replaces what's on the timeline with the clip's keys. An overlay plays the clip on top of the animation that's already there instead: a breath over a walk, a tail swish over a run, a blink over a talk. Nothing underneath changes — no keys are written — and you can stack several overlays at once.

To add one: pick the clip in the dropdown, put the playhead where it should start, and click ⊕ Overlay at playhead. It runs from there to the end of the timeline, repeating, and keeps doing so as you add frames.

Each overlay gets its own row under Rig in the dope sheet: a purple bar showing where it plays, with a tick where each repeat begins. Drag the bar to move it — with a mouse or a finger. Click the bar to select the overlay, and its settings appear on the Actions bar:

• Start — the frame it begins on (the same as dragging the bar).
• To the end — untick it to play the clip a set number of Times instead.
• Speed — 2 plays the clip twice as fast.
• Strength — how much of the clip's movement is added. 50% is a gentler breath; up to 200% exaggerates it.
• 🗑 Remove overlay — takes it off. The clip and every key stay as they are.

Unlike Insert, an overlay is a live link to its clip. To change a clip — a breath that's too fast, say — animate the new version and ● Record it under the same name: you'll be asked whether to replace the clip, and if you do, every overlay of it (and any smart bone driving it) plays the new version. Cancel keeps the old clip and records a separate one. Deleting a clip removes its overlays too (it asks first, and Undo brings both back). The transform bar and the Curves view keep showing your keys, not the overlay on top of them.

16Audio

Attach sound to a project and animate against it — essential for lip sync and for hitting beats. Sound is organised into voices: one per character, each holding that character's lines at the times they speak. A simple project just has one.

On the Audio tab (it acts on the voice and clip you've selected — click a lane to pick one):

• + Voice — add a voice for another character.
• ♪ Add clip… — add a WAV / MP3 / OGG file to the selected voice, starting at the current frame.
• Offset — when the selected clip starts, in seconds relative to frame 1. You can also drag the clip along its lane.
• Vol — the selected voice's volume, in percent.
• Remove clip / Delete voice — remove the selected clip, or the whole voice with its clips.

Each voice gets its own waveform lane at the top of the dope sheet. Double-click a lane's name to rename the voice. The M button mutes it; S solos it, so you hear only that voice (Ctrl+click S to solo several). Both work while playing. Click empty lane space to jump to a frame. On Play, picture and sound share one clock, so they can't drift, and the sound restarts each time the animation loops.

16.1Lip sync

Lip sync keys a mouth set — a switch group with one drawing per mouth shape — so the mouth changes with the voice.

1. Make a mouth set. Layers panel + → Mouth set… makes one: nine empty layers named rest, MBP, E, AI, O, U, SS, FV and L (or four for a quick one), held across every frame. Draw a mouth on each. You can build your own switch group instead — name its drawings after the shapes and they're matched automatically.
2. Open Lip sync from the Audio tab (🗣 Lip sync…). Pick the Mouth set and the Voice that drives it — the set remembers its voice, so next time it's one press.
3. Pick a source:
   • Analyse the clip — built in, works offline. It reads the shape of the sound, not the words: it is shape-accurate, not phoneme-accurate, and it depends on the speaker, the mic and background noise. It never produces L.
   • Import a lip-sync file… — a Rhubarb .json or a Papagayo / Moho .dat. This is the accurate route: run Rhubarb Lip Sync on the clip, then import what it writes.
   • Type the dialogue — type what's said and the shapes come out in order at a guessed spacing. Then drag the keys in the sheet to line them up with the waveform.
4. Check the table. It shows which drawing each shape uses; change any row.
5. Press Analyse.

• Whole clip or Loop range — which frames get written. Keys outside the range are left alone, so frames you fixed by hand survive a re-run.
• Hold — a mouth must stay for this many frames before it changes, so it doesn't flicker. A one-frame closed mouth (p, b, m) is kept anyway.
• Lead — shifts the mouths a frame or two early, the way animators place them; dead level reads as a beat late.
• Jaw / head — pick a bone to move with the voice's loudness (rotate, move up and down, or stretch, by Amount). A mouth that cuts between drawings on a perfectly still head reads as a slideshow; a little continuous movement underneath is most of what makes it look alive.

The result is ordinary switch keys: fix any frame with the Shows row, drag keys in the sheet, and Ctrl+Z undoes a pass.

17Exporting

All exports live under File → Export as…, grouped by what you get:

Sheets & atlases

• Sprite sheet (PNG) — all frames tiled into one image. The Cols box beside it sets the grid width (0 = one horizontal strip).
• Atlas (PNG + JSON) — the sheet plus an Aseprite-style JSON that names every frame's rectangle and timing. This is the pair game engines (Phaser, PixiJS, etc.) load directly.

Animation

• GIF — plays everywhere, but only 256 colors and hard transparency (smooth gradients will band; you'll get a heads-up). Best for simple pixel loops.
• APNG (lossless) — keeps full transparency. Best all-round animated image. (Saved as .png — an APNG is a valid PNG.)
• Video (MP4 / WebM) — whichever your browser encodes. Transparency becomes a dark background.
• WebM with alpha — WebM that keeps transparency, for compositing over other footage in a game engine or video editor.
• Frames as PNGs (ZIP) — every frame as its own PNG, zipped.
• Aseprite (.aseprite) — the whole animation, every frame and layer, back into Aseprite or LibreSprite.

This frame

• SVG (vector stays vector) — vector layers stay editable paths (Illustrator, Affinity, Figma, Inkscape); raster layers ride along as embedded images.
• PDF (print-ready) — vector layers stay real paths.
• Photoshop (.psd) — every layer, group and mask, opening in Photoshop, Affinity, GIMP or Krita.

Everything that moves — layer tweens, depth, the camera, bone poses and mesh deformation — is baked into every raster export (sheet, atlas, GIF, APNG, video, WebM). SVG/PDF write each layer's artwork at rest, so if the frame is animated or rigged they'll warn you first.

Audio is not muxed into video exports yet.

18Saving, loading & crash recovery

• Save (Ctrl+S) keeps the project on this device. The first time, it asks for a name; after that it is silent. A saved project is listed under Local in File → Projects (§18A). If the project is in the cloud, the same press saves it there too.
• Export a copy (.json) (File menu) downloads the project as a file — the full editable document, including layers, frames, tweens, the camera, and the whole rig. This is the copy that survives your browser's storage being cleared, and the way to move a project to another machine without an account. They reload exactly.
• Load opens a .json, or imports a PNG/JPEG (as a new project or sliced sprite strip), an SVG (added alongside your work in a freeform project), a Photoshop .psd, an Aseprite .aseprite, or a Procreate .procreate file.
• Place image on a layer adds a PNG/JPEG to the project you already have, instead of replacing it — see below.
• Close project (File menu) puts the project away and takes you back to the start screen. Closing is not deleting: it saves first, and the project waits under Your projects on the start screen — search by name, sort, and click one to reopen it. Signed in, the list also shows how much cloud room you've used (§18A).

18.1Placing an image on a layer (the "sticker" import)

Load treats an image as a whole new project. When you want to drop a picture into the drawing you're already working on — a character over a background you painted, a logo onto a mockup, a photo to trace — use Place image instead:

• File menu → Place image on a layer…, or
• the Layers panel's + button → Image…

The picture arrives on a new layer above the one you were on, and it lands floating — not yet stamped down — so you can put it where you want it first:

• Drag it to move it.
• Use the corner and edge handles to resize, or the rotate knob above it to turn it. The W / H / angle boxes take exact numbers.
• Click the ✓ (or press Esc, or pick another tool) to place it. ✕ cancels.

Nothing else in your project changes: the canvas keeps its size, your frames stay as they are, and the layers underneath are untouched.

Photoshop (.psd) import

Load a .psd and it opens as a new freeform project with your layers intact — not flattened. Layer names, groups (including nested ones), opacity, blend modes, hidden layers, clipping masks and layer masks all come across, and a layer mask stays non-destructive exactly like one you'd make here.

• Enkava projects hold up to 48 layers. A PSD with more than that has each top-level group flattened into one layer — you keep all the artwork, you just lose some of the folder structure. You'll be told when this happens.
• Text and smart objects arrive as ordinary painted layers (they look right, but aren't re-editable as text). Adjustment layers are skipped.
• A few Photoshop blend modes have no web equivalent (Vivid Light, Linear Burn, Subtract and friends). Those layers import as Normal and you get a note saying which.
• Not supported: PSB (large-document) files, and CMYK or Lab colour — convert to RGB in Photoshop first. You'll get a message rather than a silent failure.
• This is import only; Enkava also exports a single frame to layered PSD via File → Export frame (Photoshop).

Older project files keep loading: the format only ever gains fields, and a file saved by an older version opens unchanged.

18AAccounts & cloud projects (optional)

Accounts are optional. The editor is fully functional signed out — every tool, every export, autosave and crash recovery all work exactly the same. An account adds one thing: your projects kept in the cloud, so you can carry on from another device.

Signing up

Click Sign in (top-right of the editor), or the Sign in link on the website.

• Create account with an email and password. You'll get a confirmation email — click the link in it, and you'll land back in the editor already signed in.
• If the link says it was already used, that usually means it worked: mail providers scan links before you click them, which spends the one-time token. Just sign in normally.
• "Forgot your password?" emails a reset link.

Your session persists across reloads, and signing out on one tab signs you out everywhere.

Your projects (File → Projects)

One window lists everything you have made. Each project shows a picture of its first frame, and three tabs say where it is kept.

• Local — projects you saved on this device with Ctrl+S. Free, unlimited, no account.
• Cloud — projects in your account, which you can open on another device.
• Unsaved — everything else. Whatever you draw is kept here automatically, named "Untitled", "Untitled 2" and so on, whether or not you ever save it.

Click a project (or tap it) to select it: a sidebar opens with its picture, size, and when it was last changed. Open opens it; a double-click does the same. Rename and Delete are in the sidebar too. Switching projects is safe — the one you're leaving has already been kept, whole. The search box narrows the tab you're on, and Esc closes the window.

Unsaved projects don't stay forever. One that hasn't been touched for 30 days is removed. A project in its last week says how many days it has left. To keep one, open it and press Ctrl+S, or select it and press Keep — either way it moves to Local. Saved projects and cloud projects are never removed this way.

Local and Unsaved are both in your browser's own storage, so they are per-browser and per-device: another computer, or clearing your browsing data, means they aren't there. For anything you'd be sorry to lose, use File → Export a copy to keep a real file — or sign in and put it in the cloud. If this browser ever runs out of room the window says so, and until you free space your work is not being saved.

The Cloud tab. The strip along its top is about the project you have open:

• Save as a new cloud project uploads the open project and links it to the cloud.
• Save to cloud saves it again. Once a project is in the cloud, Ctrl+S does this too.
• A project stays linked when you reload or come back later. If you changed it and closed the tab before saving, it reopens with those changes and tells you how many layers haven't been sent yet.
• A cloud project you have also opened on this device is marked On this device, and opens instantly from the copy here.

Free accounts get 3 cloud projects and 50 MB of storage; Enkava Pro raises that to unlimited projects and 10 GB. Only what changed is uploaded on each save, so ordinary work is quick after the first upload.

Version history (Pro)

With Pro, every cloud save keeps the version it replaced. A save that changes nothing sends nothing, so pressing Ctrl+S twice doesn't make two versions. Select a cloud project in File → Projects and its earlier versions are listed in the sidebar, newest first, under the latest one. Click a version and the picture at the top of the sidebar changes to show that version, so you can see which one you have before opening it. Under the row is what you can do with it:

• Restore rewinds the project to that version. The way it is now is kept as a version first, so a restore can itself be undone.
• Open as a copy makes a new cloud project from that version and leaves the original as it is.
• Name gives a version a label — "Before the rewrite".
• Pin keeps a version until you delete it.
• Delete removes one.

Versions you haven't pinned are tidied automatically: every save from the last 24 hours is kept, then one per day back to 30 days, and never more than 50 per project. Versions count toward your 10 GB, but each one only holds the layers that changed, so they are usually small. The picture is of frame 1, and a version saved before pictures were kept doesn't have one.

If your Pro subscription ends, your versions are locked rather than deleted: you can't open them, and they don't count toward the free 50 MB. Subscribing again brings them back.

Working on two devices

If the same project was changed somewhere else since you last synced, Enkava will not silently overwrite anything. It stops and asks:

• Keep mine — save this device's version to the cloud. With Pro, the version it replaces is kept in the project's history.
• Keep theirs — discard this device's changes and take the cloud version.
• Save as a copy — keep both, as two separate projects.

Nothing is lost while that choice is on screen; it's a decision, not an error.

19Keyboard shortcuts

20A few workflow tips

• Animate by duplicating (D) a frame and nudging it — fastest way to rough out motion.
• Use onion skin constantly while animating; turn it off to judge the result.
• For character animation, rig once (bones + binding), then pose across frames instead of redrawing every frame.
• Start a rig rigid. Add a mesh only where the drawing visibly needs to bend — it's more to set up and more to get wrong.
• You do not need a rig to squash and stretch. For a bouncing ball, a wobble, a stretched anticipation pose — add a mesh (Shift+M) and drag its points. Key the first frame at rest so it animates out of rest rather than holding.
• Give a walk cycle an IK goal on each foot: the feet stay planted while you animate the hips, which is far easier than posing every joint by hand.
• Record a cycle as an Action once, then stamp it wherever it's needed instead of re-animating it.
• Turn on symmetry before roughing out anything with a mirror line — a face, a character front-on, wings, an icon. Block in one half, then switch it off to break the symmetry and stop the result looking machine-made.
• Reach for holds to keep pieces still while others move — it's cheaper and reads better than animating everything on ones.
• Use the camera for push-ins and pans instead of moving every layer by hand, and give layers different Z so the move gains depth for free.
• Use File → Export a copy for a .json regularly; what is kept in the browser is a safety net, not a backup.

That's the whole toolset today. Happy animating.