Docs

Render

The Render window turns an animation scene, a composition or the project's timelapse into a GIF, a PNG sequence or a video. File > Export Animation… opens it on an animation, File > Export Timelapse… on the timelapse; Animation and Timelapse at the top switch between them. Timelapse is greyed out until the project has been saved with Record timelapse on.

The Render window is laid out like a video editor's delivery page: formats down the left, settings in the middle, a player and the queue on the right.

The player

The player shows the frame as it will be exported, on white or on a checker when the background is transparent, with a transport bar: start, play, end, a scrubber, the time, loop, full screen (Esc leaves), and for a timelapse a speed. The player grows with the window. Click the frame or press Space to play; the arrow keys step one frame (Shift for ten). Beside the player an animation lists the parameters the scene drives with their live values, and a timelapse lists what each step changed.

Formats

GIF and PNG are built in. The three video formats stream frames to ffmpeg. Without it they are greyed out, and Install ffmpeg under the formats downloads it for Ayatsuri2D (no admin rights, nothing added to PATH). An ffmpeg already on your PATH is used first.

Animation settings

Pick the Scene (compositions are listed after the scenes), optionally an Expression to lay on top (None by default), and under Range tick Work area only to render just the work area (it is greyed out when the scene has none). Then the Frame rate, the Width (the height follows the canvas), and Background > Transparent for the formats that keep transparency. Folder (Choose…) is where the files go. Physics runs during the render when it is on in the editor.

Rendering a composition to MP4, WebM or MOV mixes its sound layers into the video, each at its volume and pan over the rendered range; layers turned off with the eye are left out. GIF and PNG sequences have no sound.

Timelapse settings

The project's recorded steps at a chosen number of Steps per second (six by default; the window shows the length that makes), each step eased in from the one before as it was dragged, with Hold on the finished model at the end (two seconds by default). Undone steps are left out.

Drawing

Draw with picks what draws the frames. GPU is the default: the viewport's own renderer draws each frame off screen with anti-aliasing and the pixels are read back, so the processor only encodes the video and the editor stays usable. CPU draws every frame on the processor instead, on every core.

Smooth edges draws each frame at twice the size and averages it down, which takes four times the work.

On a machine without a usable GPU the render falls back to the CPU by itself, and a render of a large canvas is then slow and takes every core for minutes. Turn Smooth edges off to cut the work to a quarter; edges will be jagged. A smaller width helps as much again. Video encoding is held to half the cores either way.

The queue

Add to queue puts the job into the Queue under the player, one card each: the name and format, a bar with the frames done and the time left while it runs, and how it ended. Stop ends a running job and removes its half-written file; a finished one has a button to open the folder, and Clear finished empties the list. Closing the Render window does not stop anything: the queue keeps running, and the jobs are there when the window opens again. Every outcome is written to the log. The window remembers its folder, format and settings between sessions, and the moc3 and image exports remember their folder, so each dialog opens where it last went.