User Guide > Library > Understanding the Library Concept

Understanding the Library Concept

Use the Library view to reuse your artwork and animation in other scenes or to build props and puppets.

What is a Library?
What is a Symbol?
What is a Template?
Understanding the Library Concept

A library is a folder where you store your templates and symbols. You can access these folders from different projects. Using the library is easy, just drag the content into the library to store your artwork and then drag it into your Timeline or Camera view when you want to reuse it.

Organize your library using subfolders. You can keep several different library folders on your hard drive or network.

A symbol is a container or construction block used to build your props, puppets and looping clips. You can use symbols to contain artwork and animation, to manipulate them as a single object, or as a case holder where you will put a series of different drawings for each body part of your puppets, or when you have a repeating cycle. However, symbols are not necessary for creating characters.

To create a symbol, drag your artwork to the Symbol library. When you drag a symbol from the Symbol library into your scene, it will be linked to the original one. If you drag a symbol into your scene several times in the Timeline view, they will all be linked to the original one. If you modify one, they will all be modified.

A symbol is local to the project and cannot be accessed directly from other scenes. To reuse a symbol's content into another scene, you must create a template out of it.

When a symbol is exposed in the Timeline view, the symbol's cells are represented as a movie strip.

A template is an individual copy of the artwork stored in the library. This package can be reused in different scenes. Once a template is stored in the library it can be accessed from any project.

Dragging a template into your scene copies the content in your Timeline and does not link it to the original. This individual copy can be modified at will.

Related Topics 

Library View