Introduction

Alekhya is a drawing and animation application for iPad. It combines a pressure-sensitive brush engine, strokes that occupy real three-dimensional space, and a timeline on which every property can be animated.

These three capabilities normally live in separate applications, and material is lost at each hand-off between them. Alekhya holds them in a single document: the drawing you paint is the drawing you place in space, and the drawing you animate.

What the application does#

Painting. A dab engine stamps a tip along each stroke, reading pressure, tilt, and azimuth from the pen. Fifty-one brushes ship across eleven categories, and the brush editor exposes the tip, the stroke, and the scatter behaviour behind them. Brushes can be built from imported tips, textures, swept ribbon designs, or three-dimensional geometry.

Depth. In a 3D shot, strokes are placed in scene space rather than stacked as flat cards. A viewport camera, which you orbit freely, is where you stand to work; a separate shot camera frames the image that is rendered. Because strokes hold real positions, parallax follows from a camera move rather than being faked. A 2D shot switches all of this off and works like a conventional flat canvas.

Animation. Frame-by-frame cels and keyframed properties share one timeline. A single layer can be drawn frame-by-frame in one place and keyframed in another. Thirty-six effects are available in a per-layer stack, and inbetweens can be generated on-device from your own drawings.

The drawing surface#

The canvas is not restricted to a flat plane. It can be curved into a cylinder, a sphere, or a cone, inward or outward, and you draw onto the curve.

Curvature is recorded per stroke at the moment the stroke is made. The grid is a tool rather than a container, so a single layer may hold strokes of many different curvatures, and re-bending the grid never disturbs strokes that already exist.

Scope#

Alekhya is not a three-dimensional modelling package, and it is not intended to become one. There is no modelling from primitives, no retopology, and no UV unwrapping. Everything that becomes three-dimensional starts as something you drew: relief is sculpted onto the drawing surface, and a solid is spun from your own profile lines.

Two limits the earlier releases stated have since been lifted, because the drawing case needed them. A sculpted body now subdivides itself under a fine brush rather than refusing to take detail finer than its triangles, and the Rig tool has a Weights mode for painting bone influence by hand when the automatic weights are wrong at a joint. Both are described where they are used.

Knowing where the edges are will save you time. The three-dimensional capabilities exist to serve drawing.

How work is organised#

Four screens nest from the outside in.

A project holds shots. A shot is one continuous piece of animation at its own resolution, and opening one lands on the canvas, where nearly all work happens. The project's Open Editor button presents a non-linear editor full-screen, which assembles shots, video, and audio into a finished sequence.

Every shot is 2D or 3D#

A shot declares its mode when it is created, and keeps it for life. 2D is the default: a flat document that behaves like any other drawing application, with no depth, no orbiting, and no 3D tools. 3D is the full workspace this manual otherwise describes.

Most of the manual applies to both. Where a control exists only in one mode, the page says so. 2D shots covers the difference in one place.

How this manual is organised#

The manual is a reference. Each page states what a control is, its exact range and default, and what it does.