What's new

Exporting big textured animations

• FixedAnimation exports no longer crash on heavy projects. A project with many painted shapes could take the browser tab down partway through an export — most often on GIF. The exporter used to build every frame of the animation up front and hold them all at once; it now streams, working one frame at a time from render through to encoding, so what it needs at any moment is a single frame rather than the whole animation. A rigged, fully textured character over a hundred frames now exports where it previously died.
• NewFlatten texture layers. A new Edit → Flatten texture layers merges each texture's layer stack down to its finished artwork — identical on canvas, typically around half the file size. Applies to your selection, or to every texture when nothing is selected, and tells you how much it saved. There's a matching ⤓ button in the texture workspace's layers panel for flattening the shape you're painting. Painting carries on as normal afterwards; you just start from one layer instead of a stack.
• ImprovedLighter textures everywhere. A texture with a single plain layer no longer stores a second copy of itself for the layer stack, so simple painted shapes take roughly half the room in save files and autosaves. Existing projects pick this up next time you paint on them, or immediately via Flatten texture layers.
• FixedPen strokes taper away instead of ending in a blob. Lifting a stylus reports zero pressure — which the brush was reading as "this device has no pressure sensor" and replacing with a neutral half-pressure. Because a quick lift sends several of those readings while the nib is still travelling, every tapered stroke finished with a cluster of full-width marks: a dot on the end of each stroke. A pen that's shown it has a working sensor is now believed when it reports zero, so strokes taper to a point as drawn. Applies to the canvas brushes and to texture paint; mice, trackpads and pressure-less styluses draw at their steady width exactly as before.
• ImprovedExports show their progress, and stay responsive. Long exports now report what they're doing — measuring, rendering, then encoding, frame by frame — and the tab keeps responding throughout instead of appearing frozen. If a requested export size is genuinely too large for the browser to hold, the scale is reduced to fit and the export tells you what it used rather than failing.

Texture paint — raster brushes on living vectors

• NewPaint on your vectors. The new Texture tool (in the toolbar left of Rig, and on a selected shape's floating bar) opens a side-by-side paint workspace: the shape on the left, its flat texture map on the right. Paint on either — strokes on a posed shape land in exactly the right spot on the map, like painting on a 3D model. The shape stays a true vector: the outline keeps its crisp edge at any zoom, and the paint rides along when the shape moves, scales, flips or deforms.
• NewTextures animate with your rigs. Bind a shape to an armature and its paint deforms with the bones — using the rig's real weights, hand-painted ones included — on the canvas, in the workspace's posed preview, and in every export: SVG, PNG and full animations. Painting is order-proof: paint before or after rigging, mid-pose, after moving or flipping the shape — the texture re-anchors itself to the geometry every time.
• NewTwo brushes, an eraser and a blender. Soft and hard brushes with a shared Feather control (the eraser feathers too — soft erasing for blending out edges), plus a Blend tool that smudges paint into the shape's own colour with a strength slider. Each tool remembers its own size, opacity, feather and pressure settings — set up two favourite brushes and switch between them. The tool buttons are live previews of their settings, and pen pressure can drive size, opacity or both.
• NewPaint layers with blend modes. A layer stack inside the workspace — visibility, opacity and the full set of sixteen blend modes with the inspector's illustrated tiles (hover to preview live). Layers persist with the shape for re-editing, new layers stay transparent, and blends composite against the shape's material colour. Flip H / V mirror the active layer's paint.
• NewColour, palette & eyedropper. The 3D Light colour picker opens straight from the workspace, the shared swatch palette sits above the panes (save colours back to it, including from the picker), and the picker's eyedropper — now wearing a proper pipette icon — samples the paint itself, never the bones or gizmos, even on a posed shape.
• NewTextured layers show their paint. The layers panel thumbnail renders the actual texture on the shape — posed shapes show the warped result — and duplicating or copy-pasting a shape carries its full texture and layer stack along, independently editable on the copy.
• FixedLong paint sessions no longer crash or lose work. Undo history and the session log now budget their memory with textured documents, looped animation playback reuses its warped frames instead of re-encoding every pass, and when a textured project outgrows the browser's autosave storage the app saves a flattened fallback and tells you — instead of silently saving nothing. Save to a file to keep full layer stacks.

Outline fixes, export playback & preview polish

• NewChoose how exports play back. The export dialog gains a Playback setting — Loop, Play once or Ping-pong — starting from the timeline's current mode. Ping-pong plays forward then back: GIFs, videos, frame sequences and generic sprite sheets bake the return pass in, Aseprite sheets stay one frame per cell and carry a native ping-pong tag, the CSS flipbook bounces with no extra frames in the file, and Lottie encodes the return pass without re-embedding its images.
• NewGradient outlines in Fast mode. A folder outline set to Fast now renders linear and radial stroke gradients instead of ignoring them for a solid colour — keeping the cheap per-frame cost during animation. Conic stroke gradients fall back to the exact outline automatically so they always render correctly.
• ImprovedTransparent GIFs keep partial opacity. Semi-transparent content — soft shadows, gradient stops with opacity — used to vanish or go solid in a transparent GIF (GIF transparency is all-or-nothing). The encoder now dithers partial alpha so coverage matches the opacity; export with a solid background for perfectly smooth blends, exactly as before.
• ImprovedA simpler, truer preview window. The animation preview's backdrop now matches your canvas — the artboard's paper, your chosen background colour, or a checkerboard when the scene is transparent. The loop and refresh buttons are gone: playback follows the timeline's Loop / Once / Ping-pong setting live, and the preview refreshes itself after edits, undo/redo, FPS, length and background changes.
• FixedOutlines follow animated visibility. A folder's outline (and fill) no longer traces artwork inside a sub-folder that's keyed invisible — previously the hidden shapes still showed in the outline on canvas (standard mode) and in every export.
• FixedDuplicated rigged art stays where you put it. Duplicating or pasting a rigged shape (or any animated object) then playing the animation snapped the copy back on top of the original, doubling it up. Copies now keep their armature, rest geometry and motion where they were dropped.
• ImprovedThe preview opens in the canvas's top-right corner. The animation preview now defaults to the top-right of the canvas instead of stacking under the Toolkit — drag it anywhere and it still remembers your spot (and “Reset panel positions” sends it back to the corner).
• FixedOnion skins respect animated folder visibility. Ghost frames no longer draw artwork whose folder is keyed invisible at that frame — a group that only appears later in the animation no longer ghosts at earlier frames.
• FixedOnion skins no longer double up on a still layer. A ghost identical to the live frame — a keyed layer that simply isn't moving here — was drawing directly on top of the artwork as a permanent shadow. Ghosts now only appear where the drawing has actually moved, deformed or changed visibility.
• NewA floating toolbar for selected keyframes. Select keys in the dopesheet and a small toolbar pops up above the timeline with the selection count, Linear / Ease / Hold easing and Copy / Paste / Delete — the common key edits right beside the keys instead of off on the transport bar. Drag it wherever suits you; it remembers its spot, and “Reset panel positions” (or a double-click on its background) sends it home.
• FixedThe timeline no longer jumps to the top when you select keys. In a tall stack of tracks, selecting, dragging or editing keyframes snapped the dopesheet back to the top and lost your place. It now keeps its scroll position through every selection and edit.
• NewBigger, adjustable bone handles. Rig joint handles now grow automatically on touch screens, and a Handle size slider in the Rig panel scales them from 0.5× to 3× — easier to grab with a fingertip. Size the selected bone on its own (per-bone sizes save with the project), or tick Scale all bones to size the whole rig at once; that rig-wide size is remembered on your device as the default for new bones.

Animation preview window

• NewPop-out animation preview. A new Preview button in the Animation Toolkit opens a small floating window that loops your animation with its own play, scrub and loop controls — a live reference to watch while you keep posing on the main canvas. Drag it anywhere that suits you.
• NewThe preview updates as you work. It refreshes itself a moment after each change, so it always reflects the current scene. Rendering happens off to the side — your canvas, selection and any in-progress edit are never disturbed, even the tweaks you haven't keyed yet.
• FixedThe preview follows the file you load. Opening a different project now regenerates the preview for that file instead of holding on to the previous animation.
• FixedThe preview stays out of the way of onion skinning. Its background frame render no longer touches your onion-skin ghosts, and it holds off refreshing while you're mid-drag or playing back — so posing and scrubbing stay smooth.
• FixedOnion skinning stops at your keyframes. Ghost frames are now clamped to the animated subject's keyed range, so the Before/After frames no longer draw held poses before the first key or after the last one — you only see ghosts where there's actual motion.

Seven new shaders

• NewSeven new shaders. The Shaders picker gains Glow (soft bloom), Emboss (carved relief), Threshold (1-bit black & white), Edge detect (line art from colour edges), Film grain (noise texture), Scanlines (CRT lines) and Halftone (a tone-following dot screen). Each has an Amount slider and works on individual layers or whole groups, on canvas and in exports.
• FixedSplit's keyboard hint. In the pen's carve tools, Split showed X but the shortcut is C — the button label and tooltip now say C.
• FixedShaders no longer cancel a layer's blend mode. Applying a shader — Pixel, Cel, Painterly, Ink, Duotone, Chromatic — or a gradient map to a layer set to Difference (or any blend) dropped the blend, so the layer stopped compositing with whatever was behind it. The stylised result now blends with the backdrop as it should, on the canvas and in exports.
• FixedA group's “Ignore blend” / “Always opaque” stroke options work under a shader. On a group that had a shader (or blur) as well as a blend mode, turning on Ignore blend mode for the group's outline wiped the blend from the whole group instead of just the stroke. The shader now applies to the group's contents while the outline is lifted out cleanly, so the members keep their blend and opacity and the stroke opts out on its own — matching how it behaves without a shader.
• New“Ignore shader” for outlines. A group stroke that opts out of the blend or opacity now keeps the shader by default, so Ignore blend no longer flattens a pixelated outline back to a plain line. When you do want a crisp, un-stylised border around shaded artwork, the new Ignore shader checkbox — shown for any layer or group that has a shader — keeps the shader on the fill while the outline stays sharp.

Nested groups & finer pixels

• NewGroup and ungroup shortcuts. ⌘/Ctrl G groups the selected layers and ⇧ ⌘/Ctrl G ungroups — quicker than the group button in the Layers panel.
• FixedGrouping a group works again. Grouping a whole folder now wraps it in a new parent group instead of nesting it inside itself — which had left the sub-group's chevron toggling with nothing inside. Documents already affected are repaired automatically when you open them.
• ImprovedThe Pixel filter goes finer. At the low end of the slider the mosaic is now around twice as fine, so large shapes can take a crisper pixel grid — the top of the slider still gives the same chunky blocks.

Safer files & sessions

• FixedYour work is protected when a session can't be restored. If an autosave is ever unreadable, BrushVector now keeps the original safe instead of overwriting it, starts you on a clean canvas, and offers File → Recover last session to download the backup. Opening a project is all-or-nothing too, so a damaged file can never half-load over what's already on your canvas.
• FixedHardened against handcrafted project and shape-pack files. Layer, bone and pose names, colours and shape data carried inside shared .vect projects, shape packs and pose libraries are now escaped everywhere they're displayed, so opening a file from someone else can't run anything it shouldn't.
• FixedShortcuts no longer fire behind a dialog. With a dialog open — Export, Save, Shortcuts or the account panel — keys like Delete, undo and duplicate could act on the hidden canvas. They're now held until the dialog closes, while its own fields and buttons keep working, and Escape always dismisses it.
• FixedCurved motion paths and easing survive re-timing. Re-keying, nudging with Auto-key on, or dragging and pasting keys in the dopesheet no longer flattens a curved path back to a straight line or resets a key's ease — the trajectory and easing you set now travel with the key.

Nudge & polish

• NewArrow-key nudging — arrows move the selected object, folder, bone or emitter by 1 unit; Shift+arrow jumps a whole gridline. Nudges key exactly like drags, so Auto-key picks them up.
• ImprovedThe Follow-through panel is now draggable, like the Pose Library — park it wherever you work.
• FixedPosing a bone with onion skinning on could record the wrong rotation when keyed — poses now key exactly what you see.
• FixedThe Pose Library and Follow-through panel titles now use the same crisp icons as the rest of the timeline.

The timeline refresh

The animation timeline got its biggest visual overhaul yet.

• NewAnimation Toolkit — occasional-use tools (Onion Skinning, Path Visualisation, Barriers, Pose Library, Follow Through, Add emitter) now live in a tidy floating panel, opened from one Toolkit button. The bar itself is leaner and reordered, with playback mode (Loop / Once / Ping-pong) as a one-click button group.
• NewReal icons everywhere — every timeline button swapped its emoji for a purpose-drawn icon set, with clear on/off/unavailable states.
• NewUndo / Redo buttons on the toolbar — no more remembering the shortcut mid-drawing.
• NewCarve into any layer — select an existing shape and the pens carve into it, not just the shape you drew last. Add to or subtract from artwork you made an hour ago.
• ImprovedEmitters — particle colour ramps get their own Colour-stops editor panel, spin gained a direction control (right / left / both), and emitter handles are much easier to grab on touch screens.
• ImprovedScenes panel now opens on demand from the bar instead of always taking up space.
• FixedSVG import — stroke-outlined icons (most icon sets) now import as proper outlines with dashes and caps intact, instead of solid blobs.
• FixedSelection no longer jumps up to the whole folder when you'd picked a single layer; picking a bone from the Layers panel while animating no longer closes the timeline; tall panels no longer run underneath it; and the emitter colour picker no longer snaps shut as you use it.

Export expansion & the Pose Library

• NewMP4 (H.264) video export — alongside WebM, GIF and frame sequences.
• NewLottie, Aseprite and TexturePacker export — lightweight vector or image-sequence Lottie for the web, plus sprite sheets with the JSON sidecars Aseprite, Phaser and PixiJS expect. The sprite-sheet studio now lives inside the Export dialog with a live packed preview.
• NewPose Library, rebuilt — a floating panel that stays open while you animate. Name poses as you save them, preview them live by selecting a tile, and choose between Apply (a pure override, no keys) and Apply & Key (keys only what changed). Poses persist across documents and share between rigs with matching skeletons.
• NewFixed-size artboards — start from print (A3–A5, US Letter), social (Instagram, X, YouTube) or screen presets, in px or mm; exports crop to the page.
• NewObject copy & paste (⌘/Ctrl+C · V), a gradient library for saving and reapplying gradients, and Basic Shapes bundled as the default stamp set.
• ImprovedSVG import lands on the canvas as one editable object per element with colours preserved — not flattened into a single monochrome stamp.
• ImprovedAccessibility pass — WCAG 2.1 AA and ARIA remediation across the app, and bigger touch targets for transform handles on tablets.
• FixedSquash & stretch now animates between keys; masked groups survive duplication; gradient maps and group shaders work together.

Frames, layout & colour

• NewFrames — fixed-size containers with per-side padding, content clipping, padding guides and a fit-to-content button. Resize the frame and the contents re-flow instead of stretching.
• NewArrange tools — align, distribute and tidy from a floating-bar dropdown, plus persistent Figma-style auto-layout groups (row/column, gap, alignment).
• NewEyedropper — press-drag to preview with a live loupe, release to pick; pixel-accurate sampling on Chromium. The draw-mode swatch bar now drives the brush palette directly.
• ImprovedColour picker on mobile — scrollable panel, tighter palette layout, and the eyedropper hides the panel while you sample. Long-press multi-selects layer rows on touch.

Lines, stamps & shape packs

• NewLine styles — dashed, dotted, per-end tapers, and a stamp style that repeats library shapes along the line. Double-click any line to edit it as a multi-point centreline with per-point thickness.
• NewShape packs — export and import whole library categories to share brushes and stamp sets.
• NewHold S with the stamp brush to place a single stamp exactly where you release.
• FixedBone collision now tests the whole bone, not just the joint; pressure→opacity is smoother and reaches full opacity.

Spins, loops & aim

• NewMulti-turn bone spins — rotations key past a full turn, so windmills, wheels and flips animate the long way round when you mean them to.
• NewLook-at constraint — a bone tracks a draggable (and keyframable) target locator: heads follow a ball, eyes follow a character.
• NewBone colliders, one-click Smooth for jerky motion, and Cyclic for pop-free seamless loops.
• ImprovedFollow-through can be confined to a segment of a chain with End at; the Selection panel reorganised into collapsible sections.

Barriers

• NewFloors, ceilings and walls — lines your rig can't cross. Tilt them into ramps, keyframe their height for stairs and platforms, use per-barrier No-slip to plant feet, and Keep-bone-lengths so limbs rotate rather than compress.
• ImprovedEmitters became first-class animation citizens: keyable opacity/scale/rotation/visibility, attachable to bones, with shaders and strokes of their own.

Particles, shaders & follow-through

• NewParticle engine — any library shape becomes a particle. Sparks, snow, smoke, confetti and fire, fully deterministic so every export reproduces identically.
• NewShader effects — Pixel art, Cel, Painterly, Ink outline, Duotone and Chromatic, applied to layers or groups, exporting losslessly to SVG.
• NewAutomatic follow-through — the signature: springy, lagging secondary motion generated for a whole bone chain from the animation you've already made, tuned live, then baked to editable keys.
• NewAnimated GIF export, direct bone-rotation handles, and keyable folder visibility/opacity.

Animation arrives

One week, a whole timeline.

• NewThe timeline — dopesheet with per-property lanes, keyframing, auto-key, easing (Linear / Ease / Hold), stop-frame "on twos", a full graph/F-curve editor, onion skinning, named scenes, key copy/paste and marquee-scaling.
• NewBone animation — pose and key rigs right on the timeline, with FK/IK switching and an on-canvas motion-path editor with draggable Bézier arcs.
• NewAnimation export — PNG frame sequences, sprite sheets with a live-preview studio, WebM video and self-contained CSS flipbooks.
• NewRiggers' tools — lockable bones (plant a foot), stretchy bones (tails and squash), and growing a bound rig with new bones and artwork without starting over.

Bones & the groundwork

• NewBone rigging — build an armature, bind artwork with smooth skinning, pose with FK/IK, paint weights with a live heatmap.
• NewPerspective grid, a tree/branch tool with convert-to-skeleton, editable brush centrelines, and a standardised icon set across the app.

Foundations

• NewTypography overhaul — a 12-family bundled font library with a searchable live-preview picker, load-your-own-font support, and editable line height and letter-spacing.
• NewThe .vect file format — named local saves with ⌘/Ctrl+S quick-save, PNG and SVG export, and autosave session restore. Your work, on your disk, from day one.