Tool Palette
The always-visible strip of tool icons, where it can sit, and all seventeen tools in palette order with what each one does.
Reference
- Menu
- Window ▸ Tool Strip
The tool palette is a narrow vertical strip of icons pinned to one edge of the canvas. It is always visible, it holds every tool the canvas has, and tapping an icon makes that tool current.
The palette is not a dockable panel. It cannot be torn out, tabbed into a group, iconised to a rail, or floated, and it does not appear in Window ▸ Panels. Its only placement control is Window ▸ Tool Strip.
The strip
The strip is 40 points wide. Each tool occupies a row carrying a small icon; the list scrolls vertically when the screen is too short to show them all. The current tool is drawn as an accent-filled rounded rectangle behind its glyph. Each icon's accessibility label is the tool's name as given in the table below.
Draw is the current tool when a shot opens.
A 2D shot has sixteen
Sculpt 3D is the only tool a 2D shot does not offer — its whole subject is geometry a flat document cannot hold. Every other tool is present in both modes.
Pins the palette to the left edge of the canvas, outside the left dock column. This is the default for a layout that has never been saved.
Pins the palette to the right edge, outside the right dock column.
Removes the strip and returns its 40 points to the canvas. Tools remain switchable from the Apple Pencil double-tap gesture; there is no other tool picker.
The editor has no tool strip: its workspace sets the width to zero. Focus mode also removes it, along with every dock column.
The seventeen tools
The order below is the palette's order, top to bottom. It does not change.
| # | Tool | What it does | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Draw | The raster paint brush. Lays a stroke of dabs with the current brush, on the front-most content under the pen. | |
| 2 | Eraser | A pixel eraser. Rubs ink, fills and coverage out of the strokes on the active draw target. | |
| 3 | Blend | Mixes the colour already on the canvas. Three sub-tools: Blend, Blur and Fingertip. | |
| 4 | Sculpt Stroke | Deforms the points of existing strokes — grab, smooth, pinch, inflate, flatten. | |
| 5 | Sculpt 3D | Pushes form about with a seventeen-brush set — relief over a drawing surface, or a solid directly. 3D shots only. | |
| 6 | Shape | Rubber-band line, rectangle, ellipse or polygon, stroked with the current brush. | |
| 7 | Select | Selects with a tap, a box or a lasso. Four scopes: Object, Part, Mask and Smart. | |
| 8 | Fill | Taps inside an outline to fill the enclosed region; drags to fill many regions in one pass. | |
| 9 | Gradient | Drags inside a region to fill it with a From-colour to To-colour ramp. | |
| 10 | Text | Places editable text objects, with a full character, paragraph and 3D extrude stack. | |
| 11 | Vector Pen | Draws persistent editable vector paths, freehand or point by point. | |
| 12 | Hand | Drags anywhere to pan the viewport. Lays down no ink and has no controls of its own. | |
| 13 | Transform | A 3D gizmo over the grid, the layer, a selection, an object, or the shot camera. | |
| 14 | Warp | A 3D lattice over the layer's artwork — fold or wrap it like paper or cloth. | |
| 15 | Puppet | Drops pins on a character and poses it by dragging them; the art bends between the pins. | |
| 16 | Rig | Builds one skeleton for the layer or the rigging folder, then poses it. Weights are automatic, and can be painted by hand. | |
| 17 | Particles | Taps to drop a placed particle effect from a preset library. |
Three names to get right
The palette's names are the names used everywhere else — in the menu bar, in the Tool Options header, and throughout this manual. Three of them are commonly misremembered.
The brush tool is Draw. There is no tool called "Brush". The brush is what Draw is holding: which brush it holds is chosen in Sub Tool and tuned in Brush Settings.
There is no object-select tool. Object and pixel are not separate tools; they are the Scope setting inside Select, alongside Mask and Smart.
Sculpting is two tools, not one. Sculpt Stroke deforms the points of strokes you have already drawn. Sculpt 3D sculpts form — relief over a drawing surface, a painted layer lifted out of its plane, or a solid. They share nothing but a prefix.
What switching tool changes
Some tools prepare the active layer when they are selected, so that there is something to work on.
| Switching to | Effect |
|---|---|
| Any tool while text is being edited | The text edit is cancelled. |
| Any tool away from Vector Pen | The path in progress is committed. |
| Warp, on a layer with no warp | A warp lattice is added, fitted to the layer's content bounds. |
| Puppet, on a layer with no puppet | A pinless puppet rig is added, fitted to the content. Nothing happens if the layer cannot be rigged. |
| Rig, on a layer with no puppet | The conforming mesh the bones will skin is built. |