Symbols

A symbol is a drawing stored once and placed many times. Edit the sword, and every animation holding it changes — that is the whole point, and it is why a placement refers to the symbol rather than copying it.

Symbols belong to the project, not to one animation, because a prop lives above the animations that use it. View → Symbols opens the panel, and it works with no project open too — your own library is yours, and it should be there when you open the app to draw one picture. Placing one into a loose file copies it into that file, so it still saves and reloads on its own. What needs a project is making a project symbol, since there would be nowhere to put it.

Two libraries: this project, and yours

	Where it lives	Who can use it
Project	in the project	everything under that project, and nothing outside it — unless you narrow it to a folder, below
Global	your own library, beside your brushes	every project you make, and one you start tomorrow

The panel shows both in one grid, with a ◈ on the global ones and a filter beside the kind filter when you want only one.

Promote copies a project symbol up into your library. It is a copy, not a move — the project keeps its own. There is no demote, because it would not mean anything: a global symbol you have placed is already in that project, so making it project-only is just removing it from your library.

Placing a global symbol copies it into the project first, and this is the one thing worth understanding rather than just using. It means:

• The project still renders with your library gone — move the folder to another machine, hand it to somebody else, open it in five years, and the art is there. That is why it works this way.
• Editing a symbol in your library does not change projects that already placed it. That is the price. A finished shot cannot change under you, which is the same trade templates make.

To roll a library fix forward, Update from library appears in the panel when your library has a newer version of something this project uses. It is the project asking; nothing in your library ever reaches into a project on its own. Placements are untouched and need no touching — they refer to the symbol by identity, so replacing what that identity resolves to is the update.

Narrowing a project symbol to one folder

By default a project symbol is offered to every drawing in the project, which is what the table above says and what every project means until you say otherwise.

Share a symbol onto a folder — drag it from the asset library onto the folder's row in the project manager's Assets tab, or pick it from the row's share picker — and that stops being true: from then on a folder is offered the symbols declared on it and on the folders above it, and nowhere else gets them. It is the only one of the folder declarations that takes away — a palette shared on a folder adds to what is available, a symbol shared on a folder is a decision that the rest of the project should not see it. The status line says so the first time, because a picker that quietly loses most of its contents is a bad way to learn a rule.

Two things it does not do:

• It never narrows your own library. Global symbols are yours in every project. Placing one copies it into the project, where it can then be declared like anything else.
• It never changes a drawing. A document that already places a symbol keeps drawing it after you move it somewhere that does not declare it — a placement resolves by its own id, and narrowing is the picker's business.

Taking the last symbol declaration back returns the project to offering everything, rather than to offering nothing.

The full set of folder declarations — palettes, gradients, guides, templates and export presets alongside this one — is in Documents and projects.

Making one

Draw something, then Make symbol — in the panel's footer, under Edit, or on F8 — and give it a name. The strokes leave the drawing and a placement of the new symbol takes their place. Nothing about the picture changes at that moment: the mark is the same mark, in the same position.

It takes what you have selected, or the whole drawing if you have selected nothing. So the usual way to pull a sword out of a picture you are already drawing is to lasso it and press F8. There is no separate tool to learn — the ordinary Select, marquee and lasso are what it reads.

• Picked lines come out whole, because picking a line means the line.
• A boxed or lassoed region takes what is inside it, and a line crossing the edge keeps the part outside — the same thing Delete leaves behind, so the two cannot disagree about what a selection means.
• Erasers are left out. An eraser copied on its own would land where there is nothing beneath it to rub out.

A symbol made this way carries the shape it was clipped by, so it looks the same wherever you place it — including in a document it was not drawn in.

What a symbol can hold

A symbol holds a stack of layers, each with as many drawings as you like — lines, colour, shading, effects, the same way an artwork is built anywhere else in the application. A head is one symbol, not four.

• Layers are up, frames are along. Adding a layer inside a symbol gives it another sheet; adding a cel gives it another drawing in time. A colour layer holding one drawing under a twelve-frame line test is a twelve-frame symbol, not a thirteen-frame one.
• Everything a layer does, it does inside a symbol — opacity, blend mode, hiding, masks, clipping to the layer below, live effects and adjustment layers. They travel with the symbol to every placement of it.
• Make symbol takes the layer you are on, and only the strokes on it. To get the rest of the stack in, open the symbol and build it there — see Editing one.
• A symbol needs strokes. A drawing that is imported pixels with nothing drawn on it cannot become a symbol — you will be told there is nothing to make one from.

Four things a symbol layer deliberately cannot do, because none of them mean anything inside one: follow a bone, run a simulation, sit in a document's layer folder or link, or be marked as background or out-of-export.

Several layers at once

Pick the layers in the Layers docker, or link them, then right-click a layer and choose Make symbol of these layers…. Lines, colour, shading and effects become one thing you can place, in the order they were stacked.

What is left behind depends on what is left. A layer the capture empties has nothing more to say and goes with it; a layer still holding drawings on other frames keeps them and loses only what was taken. The lowest layer always stays, because the placement has to live somewhere and where the stack was is where it belongs.

If the layers hold drawings on other frames you are asked once whether to take every drawing — which makes an animated symbol — or only the one showing — which makes a still one. Layers holding a single drawing each are captured without a word, because both answers would give the same symbol.

Placing, moving, and letting go

• Place puts the selected symbol in the middle of the current drawing.

• Dragging a tile onto the canvas puts it where you drop it, which is the point of dragging rather than pressing Place. While you drag over the canvas the symbol is shown under the pointer where it will land, at the canvas's zoom and rotation — the drawing it will show on this frame, faded so you can see what is under it; what lands is the symbol at its own strength. Over a hidden or locked layer nothing is shown, because nothing would land. Leave the canvas and it goes; nothing is placed until you let go over the drawing.

• Your own library is there without a project. Symbols you have promoted show in the panel for a loose drawing too; placing one copies it into the document.

• A symbol with more than one drawing is asked about, because it can land two ways and both are things people mean:

  • Import every drawing into the timeline — the drawings become frames of this scene, and the scene grows to at least the length of the symbol.
  • Place one that cycles on its own — a single placement that runs through its own drawings without changing how long the scene is.

  Tick Don't ask again and the answer is kept. Change it back, or pick the other one, under Configure ▸ Library ▸ Placing a symbol that has more than one drawing. A symbol holding a single drawing is never asked about, because both answers would do the same thing.

• The Move tool drags a placement the way it drags anything else. A placed symbol under the cursor is picked up before the drawing underneath it is; the symbol itself is not touched, so the other placements of it stay where they are. Hold Shift to keep the move to one axis.

• Several at once: select them with the Select tool first, and the Move tool then drags the whole selection together — from anywhere on the canvas, not only from on top of one of them. The group is one undo step, so taking the move back takes all of it back.

• Break link turns a placement back into ordinary strokes on that drawing. Select the placed symbol first — the Arrow tool picks one up — then Edit ▸ Break symbol link. It is the honest way to get something you can edit stroke by stroke, and it is a one-way door: the result is a drawing, not a symbol. There is no key on it by default, and there is one to give it in Configure ▸ Shortcuts if you use it often.

  • It breaks the frame you are looking at. Breaking a placement of an animated symbol gives you that one drawing, not the cycle.
  • It gives you strokes on one layer, because a symbol holds one layer's drawing — see What a symbol can hold below.

A placement can be moved, scaled, rotated, faded and time-offset. It cannot have one of its strokes nudged — that would be a different drawing, and pretending otherwise is how a symbol quietly becomes a copy.

Finding one

The panel filters by kind — prop, pose, expression, hand, face, FX, background — and searches names and tags. Tags are a plain comma-separated line rather than folders, because a sword is a prop, and it is also "knight", and also "act two"; filing it once makes the other two searches fail.

Narrowing the list does not lose what you had selected, as long as it still matches — so you can pick a symbol, type to bring it closer, and still press Place. A filter that hides it does clear the selection, because there is nothing left on show to act on.

Cycles

A symbol can hold several frames — a walk, a flicker, a blink. A placement of one advances with the timeline, and its frame offset shifts where in the cycle it starts, so one stored walk can carry two characters half a stride apart.

Using a cycle as something to draw over

A stored cycle makes a good underlay: a plain, unstyled base animation you draw the real thing on top of, updated in one place. It works today, in three steps:

1. Make the cycle as a symbol — line only, no styling. Keep it global if more than one project needs it.
2. Place it on its own layer, below the one you will draw on. Drop that layer's opacity so it reads as a guide.
3. Right-click that layer → In exports → Never export this layer.

Now the base cycle is a live link: fix the timing or the drawing once and every animation built over it follows, and none of them ship it. This is the base-character workflow — one "knight, no styling, 12-frame run", drawn over per shot.

A proper reference layer — one setting that ghosts it, keeps it out of exports and badges it in the Layers docker, instead of the three steps above — is Planned.

Editing one

Select a tile and press Edit, or double-click it. The symbol opens in a tab of its own with a transparent background — a symbol is drawn over something, so there is no paper behind it — and you draw on it with the ordinary tools. A multi-frame symbol gets a cel per frame on the timeline, so a cycle is edited the way any short animation is.

Every change lands in the symbol as you make it. There is no apply step. Switch back to an animation and every placement of that symbol is already showing the new drawing. That is the whole promise of the feature, and it is why a symbol is worth making instead of copying a drawing around.

A symbol tab cannot be saved as a file of its own: it belongs to the project, and saving the project writes it.

The tab is a real layer stack. Add layers, reorder them, set opacity and blend modes, mask one against another — it is the ordinary Layers docker over the symbol's own artwork, and every placement of the symbol shows the result. Adding a cel still adds a drawing in time; adding a layer adds a sheet.

Knowing what changed under you

When a symbol is edited, placements made before the edit are marked as such. Nothing is broken — they already show the new drawing — but the app can tell you which of the drawings in front of you changed while you were elsewhere. Acknowledge, in the Symbols panel, clears the marks; it changes nothing about the picture. The bar is not there at all when there is nothing to report.

There is deliberately no "put it back the way it was when I placed it". The fix for an edit nobody wanted is to undo it in the symbol, once — not to pin two hundred placements to old copies of it.

Deleting, and exporting

Usage counts where the selected symbol is placed — how many placements, in how many documents — across the whole project. It is a button rather than something the panel keeps up to date, because answering it means reading every animation in the project, and a character with forty of them should open by reading one file rather than forty.

Deleting a symbol leaves any placements of it alone; they simply stop drawing, and the app tells you how many were left behind. That is deliberate — a delete that quietly edited forty animations is not one anybody could risk. Press Usage first if you want to know before rather than after.

Export document… writes a standalone file that carries the symbols it uses, so an exported animation renders identically somewhere else.

Symbols cannot contain other symbols.