Cels
Frame-by-frame drawings that hold until the next cel replaces them — creating, clearing, trimming, selecting, and onion skin.
Reference
- Mode
- Draw
- Panel
- Timeline
- Menu
- Animation ▸ Show Timeline
A cel is a frame-by-frame drawing. It is not a copy of the artwork but a reference: at this frame, this layer shows the content bucket with this identifier. A cel holds — the drawing stays on screen until another cel replaces it. This is the one place the Timeline does not interpolate. Every other kind of animation on a layer is a keyframe channel, which does.
Because a cel is a reference, drawing substitution costs nothing: a later cel that points at a bucket an earlier cel already used shows that same drawing again, with no duplication.
Still layers and animated layers
A layer with no cel track is fully static. It resolves to its own single implicit drawing at every frame, which is why a scene made before any animation existed needs no configuration at all.
The first cel operation on such a layer converts it. Its existing artwork becomes the cel at frame 0, so nothing is lost in the conversion. If every cel is later removed and only that implicit frame-0 cel remains, the layer collapses back to a still layer.
Creating cels
Inserts a blank cel — a fresh, empty content bucket — at the playhead on the active draw target, and moves the playhead to it. The drawing does not change mode; the new cel is ready to draw on.
Icon-only. Copies the drawing currently showing at the playhead into a new bucket and places it as a cel at the playhead. This is the hold-then-modify workflow: duplicate, then change what moved.
Icon-only. Empties the active layer's contents but keeps the cel slot in place, leaving an intentional empty drawing rather than a gap. Clearing joins the stroke undo history, not the timeline's.
Icon-only. Deletes the cel active at the playhead, which works from anywhere inside a hold and not only from the cel's start frame. The preceding cel expands into the freed span; if nothing precedes it, a blank cel is inserted in its place so the span stays explicit.
A new cel never overwrites an existing cel's start frame — it slides forward to the first free frame. Frames in the middle of a hold are free, so a new cel lands exactly on the playhead and splits the hold there. Adding a cel past the end of the timeline grows the frame count to include it.
Cel blocks in the track area
Each cel draws as a rounded block spanning its hold.
| Appearance | Meaning |
|---|---|
| One flat grey block across the whole timeline | The layer has no cel track — it is still |
| Filled, accent-coloured, brighter | A drawing cel on the active target |
| Filled, accent-coloured, dimmer | A drawing cel on an inactive target |
| Dashed outline | A blank cel — an intentional empty hold |
| A small dark dot at the left edge | The cel's start frame |
| A bright ring around the block | Selected for inbetweening |
Selecting and trimming
Toggles selection of that cel. The hit is resolved in cell space, so the whole visible width of a block selects that block. Selection is capped at eight cels; a ninth drops the oldest.
Trims the cel — changes its exposure. Later cels on the track ripple to follow, and a cel cannot be trimmed below one frame. The grab radius is about 11 pt and resolves to the nearest boundary.
Cel selection also clears any inbetween overrides, raster links, and the inbetween edit segment, so a new selection always starts from a clean correspondence.
Navigating drawing to drawing
The transport's previous cel and next cel buttons step to cel boundaries on the active draw target rather than to adjacent frames. On a track exposed on twos or threes this walks drawing-to-drawing at whatever rhythm the cels were placed on. Switching the Timeline to Draw mode filters the row tree down to rows that draw cels and turns onion skin on, which is the flipbook arrangement of the same controls.
Onion Skin
Onion skin ghosts the neighbouring drawings behind the current one. The ghosts are taken from the active draw target's own cel track — the layer you are drawing on, one of its sub-layers, or its mask — and not from the plane the target happens to sit on.
Reference
- Panel
- Timeline
- Section
- Onion skin
Switches the ghosts on. Switching the Timeline to Draw mode turns this on.
How many drawings before the current one are ghosted. The stepper reads
Previous cels: <n>.
How many drawings after the current one are ghosted. The stepper reads Next cels: <n>.
Previous drawings are tinted warm red; next drawings are tinted cool blue. Each step further from the current drawing is dimmer than the last, and the ghosts composite faintest-first so that nearer drawings read on top. Blank cels are skipped — an intentional empty hold contributes no ghost. The ghost opacity itself is fixed and is not exposed as a setting.
Cels and keyframes coexist
A layer is not either frame-by-frame or keyframed. It is both, wherever each is the right tool.
A cel track and a property channel are independent things attached to the same layer. The same character layer can carry hand-drawn cels for the eye blinks while its Position channel is keyframed to carry it across the frame; a rigged layer's bone rotations can be keyed while its mouth is drawn cel by cel on a sub-layer. Nothing in either system has to be turned off for the other to work, and the Timeline shows both on the same rows, at the same time, in Compose mode.