What's new

0130 September 2026

This entry covers everything that shipped between 18 and 30 September. The guide was checked against the editor again on this date.

Designing

A top bar built like an app. The file buttons moved into the OmniMotion ▾ menu: Back to projects, Save, Import file…, Import HTML…, Copy link, the theme and Settings. The middle reads Projects / your project with the save state; on the right sit Audio, Design check, Simulate, ✦ AI, the panel buttons, Performance, Preview and Export. Import file… always opens a .omni as a new project. Read The interface.

Design check and Performance. Design check looks over the scene without AI — overlapping pages, text that doesn't fit, placeholder images, fonts that didn't load, animations that do nothing — and a number on the button counts what needs fixing. Performance shows frame time, a Measure run and the GPU the browser reports. Read The interface.

Selecting and resizing like a design tool. Inside a group the first click selects the group and a double-click goes inside; Ctrl+click picks the exact layer. The pivot is gone from the middle of the handles (it lives behind Motion handles), several layers resize and rotate as one box, K scales content with the box, and holding Alt measures. Alt+drag duplicates and Ctrl+Shift+V pastes in place. Read Drawing & layers.

Frames, auto layout and layout grids. Ctrl+Alt+G wraps anything in a frame whose children keep their pins; Contents switches between frame and group behaviour. Dragging a page's handles resizes it for real. Shift+A adds auto layout and reads gap, padding and direction from how the layers already sit; Size takes Hug or Fixed. + Add → Layout Grid gives a frame column guides (Ctrl+Shift+4). Read Layout & Cascade.

A calmer Properties panel. Design mode keeps the panel to design rows; Motion brings back keyframe badges, deform and behaviour. Changed and the Layout · Shape · Style · Behavior tabs shorten it further. With several layers selected, edits apply to all of them and differing fields read Mixed. Read Properties & styling.

Styling closer to CSS. No fill, stroke Align (Inside / Center / Outside), per-corner radii, a list of drop and inner shadows with Spread, Layer Blur and Background Blur. Copy properties / Paste properties (Ctrl+Alt+C / Ctrl+Alt+V) carry a look between layers. Select a word while typing and press Ctrl+B, I or U to style just those characters; named text and effect styles have Update and Detach. Read Styling, masks & blend.

Export a layer, not just a page. PNG exports the selected layer at 1x, 2x or 3x; SVG vector, Copy as PNG and Copy as SVG are new. The Files tab has an Icons face with open icon sets placed as editable vectors. Read Export.

Components you can trust. Ctrl+Alt+K turns any selection into a main component where it stands. Alt+drag, Ctrl+D or paste on a master makes instances; double-click goes inside one. Variant sets have named axes (+ Axis), + Property adds Text, Color, Boolean or Instance swap properties, and components nest. Masters can live on a Components artboard, and Detect components turns a page's repeats into components in one undo step. A deleted master no longer breaks its instances — Restore main component brings it back. Read Components.

Import HTML. Import HTML… (top bar menu), Import file… with an .html, or an .html dropped on the canvas turns a web page into an editable artboard. Pick a Width (Mobile · 390 to Desktop · 1440 or Custom…) and whether repeated cards and rows become components. Tailwind is compiled, images and Google Fonts come into the project, and it is one undo step. Google Stitch can also design screens that arrive as layers. Read Importing HTML & Stitch screens.

Motion and type

Variable font effects. A text layer's Variable font block has a slider per axis, with ★ on the axes unique to that font. Under Effect, pick Reveal, Wave, Breathe, Pulse, Follow mouse or Sweep, choose the axes, set Strength and Speed, and ＋ Add. Tune opens a strip of your own letters with a draggable window that Stays, follows Keyframes, rides With reveal or Loops. Read Variable fonts.

Fast text entrances. Six new presets — Flash, Slam, Stretch snap, Drop, Spin pop and Skew in — also set Timing and Easing, because their punch comes from a short, hard move. Read Text animation.

Choreography in the Motion view. ✦ AI › Motion writes motion as beats instead of keyframes. Rough in stages an artboard in reading order; Feel (Calm, Snappy, Cinematic) re-times everything at once; staggers run in order, reverse, from the center, the edges, at random or by grid, and repeat with yoyo. Hand-edited keys are kept until Re-apply. Read Choreography & the Motion tab.

Motion check. The Motion button on the timeline measures the active sequence — motion cut off at the end, Linear curves, everything starting together, dead time, jumps — with Select on each. It works without AI. Read Timeline & animation.

Colour over time. Fill, Stroke and Shadow › Color take keyframes, and colours in between stay vivid instead of passing through grey. Set Appearance in a rule takes a Duration and easing. Read Timeline & animation.

Screen transitions. Go to Artboard offers Instant, Dissolve, Smart animate, Push and Slide in, with direction, duration and easing. Smart animate glides same-named layers to their new place and fades the rest; Go Back plays the transition in reverse. Read Screen transitions.

Motion path on the canvas. A layer moving in X and Y shows its path, faint outlines at each key and a diamond per key. Drag a diamond to move the key in space (Shift = one axis); Alt+drag retimes it. Read Timeline & animation.

One Sequences view. The Film tab is gone — Sequences is one graph. Click a node to activate it, double-click to dive in, right-click to rename, duplicate, move or delete; All variations wires every missing transition. Read Timeline & animation.

✦ AI

One ✦ AI panel. The bar under the canvas and the Assistant and Shots tabs are now one ✦ AI tab: Direction (Look, palette, Ref) at the top, Chat · Motion · History, and one text box. Chips above the box run a ✦ verb at a stated cost; typed text goes to the assistant. History keeps everything AI did, with Restore on assistant turns — Shots is now History › Made. Show me how answers with steps instead of changing the scene. Read The AI assistant.

Explore ideas. Four different directions appear on the canvas as real scenes. React with ♥ Like, ✕ Not this or More like this, steer with the Calm ↔ Wild, Airy ↔ Dense and Still ↔ Kinetic sliders, Blend picks, then Write the spec → and Build →. Read Explore ideas.

Recipe templates and brands. Templates ▾ runs ready chains with your Ref, Save brand keeps Ref, Look and recipes for Start from brand, and recipes can replay Change. Read Reference, Look and Recipe.

Interact

Values and Lists. The Variables tab switches between Values, Lists and Theme. + asks for a type (Number, Text, Toggle, Color); Persist and Exposed to host sit on the type icon; Drives and Written by show what a variable feeds and which rules write it. Lists are edited with + Item and + Field, and a Data Repeater's Data is List, Count, JSON or URL. Read Data sources.

Newly documented. The Wheel trigger, mouse speed / sign and wheel sources, the chain editor's More stages (Sign, Absolute, Not, Compare, Mix, Accumulate) and the Control group for Slider and Toggle layers. Read Triggers, targets & verbs.

0218 September 2026

3D physics. A mesh that is a direct child of a Scene3D can take + Add → Physics Body — it falls, bounces and rests on a static neighbour in Play / Simulate. Grab and throw in play (the camera does not orbit). collide / collideStart sentences and Physics actions (pctl) speak 3D, including $hit.nz and vz. A Plane can take + Add → Cloth instead: pin the top (or corners), drape, collide with those bodies, grab and pull. Design stays put. Field is still GPU deform — it is not cloth. Read Physics.

Your own API keys. Settings › AI & Generation takes a Fal, Claude and Gemini API key. Save uses it on the next request — no restart. Keys stay on this browser; they are never written into the project or a .omni. Forget removes one; Reset settings leaves keys alone. Read The interface and The AI assistant.

Face camera. A mesh's Transform has Face camera: Off, Upright or Full. The object's +Z stays toward the camera every frame. Upright only yaws (cards and sprites stay vertical); Full also pitches and rolls with the view. Rotate X / Y / Z stay as an offset. On a mesh with Clones, each copy faces the camera and Orient is ignored. Read Meshes, models & 3D text.

Projector stamp. + Light offers Projector — it stamps an image, video or layer onto mesh faces in its frustum. It does not light the scene (that is still Spot with a gobo). Default Receivers: All meshes; Choose with nothing ticked stamps nobody. Intensity is stamp strength (0–100 %, default 100). Up to four Projectors stamp live at once. Bake stamp writes the current frustum onto each receiver so you can rotate and stamp another face; Clear baked removes it. Ctrl+Z undoes a bake. Read Lights & environment.

Click the artboard on a mesh. A mesh whose Base Color is a Layer (an artboard or 2D layer, Projection: UV) now receives Play clicks and hover on that layer's children — a button drawn on the artboard is a button on the plane. Hide the source on the page if you only want it in 3D. Projector stamps stay pictures. Read Materials & textures.

0312 September 2026

Design · Simulate · Play. Interactions no longer run while you design — selecting a layer never fires its click rule, and nothing a rule does leaks into the saved file. To run them while you keep editing, press Simulate in the top bar (Shift+P): hovers, keys, timers, data and Streams (∿ — mouse, scroll and sequence drivers) are live; Ctrl+click fires a click rule; stopping rewinds the scene (Keep on the banner keeps it). The Sentences dock shows ○ Design / ⟳ Simulating / ▶ Playing. The old Rules run while editing setting is gone. Leaving Play or Simulate now also stops every running tween and pending chain.

3D gallery from data. A mesh's Clones → Gallery reads its photos from a Data source (∿ From data…: source, path, field), or takes many files at once with + Add photos… / drop. Motion Pose gets Focus: Clicked photo (3D gallery) — click a photo to bring it forward, click again to put it back — and its Easing list now offers every curve (Elastic, Bounce, Expo…). Motion Pose settings are saved with the file (they were not before).

Fixes. Deleting a layer no longer leaves other sentences, state machines or component instances pointing at it — a later layer could silently inherit those references. Set Texture resolves {Source.path} templates like Set Image. Play Sound, a sequence's drive expression and custom bezier easings now survive save and load (they were dropped). Duplicating or pasting a layer with sentences now points those sentences at the copy — layer('Card') becomes layer('Card 2'), and a rule that targeted a sibling inside the copy targets the copied sibling, not the original.

0411 September 2026

Data sources. Data is no longer a box inside one Data Repeater. In the Variables tab, Data sources hold named JSON, REST or host-fed data — and everything reads it by name: a repeater (Data Source › Data source, or Move to Data source on an existing one), a stream (Data › Data field, or data('Products','total') in an expression), a text or image (∿ From data… with {Products.0.name} templates and |2 |,2 |%1 |time |HH:mm formats), a map (Markers from data), and the page embedding the scene (setData / getData). The last fetch stays in the file, so scenes open offline. CSV pastes straight in. Read Data sources.

Sentences for apps. New triggers On Data, Every N seconds and After idle; new actions Set Data (set / append / remove / clear), Send request (GET / POST with a JSON body, response into a source), Open URL, Go to artboard and Set Image. Refresh Data can target a source. {Products.clicked.name} reads the row of the clicked copy.

Expressions. $clock.hour / minute / second / weekday / dayProgress … for signage, and seeded random(seed) / noise(x) that stay stable frame to frame. data() takes separate path segments so a String variable can pick a branch: data('Strings', text('lang'), 'title').

Fixed. Live-value text bindings and map markers are now saved with the scene — both used to vanish on reload. The Data Repeater guide moved from Sound to Interact.

0510 September 2026

Recipe. A chain of ✦ generations — Take, Take, Between — can be saved from Why with Save as Recipe and lives as a card above Shots. Swap the product photos in Ref, press Run with new Ref, and every step runs again on the same artboards and camera angles with the new product. Read Reference, Look and Recipe.

Product campaign starter. On the Projects screen, a ready set — table, product blockout, lights, a first camera angle — with Ref empty. Drop your product photo into Ref and Take.

The AI guide grew. The ✦ verbs lists every verb and the real model behind it; Reference, Look and Recipe and Shots and Storyboard are their own pages; the shortcut list has a ✦ AI section.

One ✦ AI, three surfaces. The old AI panel and the scattered generate buttons are gone. A single ✦ AI toggle (also Shift+S) opens one system: a bar under the canvas that makes things, an Assistant tab that talks, and a Shots tab that keeps everything either one has produced. Nothing it makes is ever deleted — discard just hides it. Read The AI assistant.

Ref and Look. ✦ Ref holds up to four reference images — every generation that supports it stays the same product, automatically; a set (an artboard and what's inside it) can hold its own Ref instead of the project's. ✦ Look is a style sentence every generation leans on. Click the swatch to set it from an image instead of typing: a five-color palette and a sentence come out of it for free, no extra model call.

Make, Paint, Take and more. The bar's verbs follow what's selected — nothing selected makes Make; an artboard offers Paint (render the blockout in place) and Take (a new angle beside it, camera-aware); a generated image offers Vary, Animate, Edit (remove an object, erase and fill, upscale, cut out, split an ad-style image into its editable layers, or split a photo into transparent depth layers for a parallax effect), and Build (a 3D model in a new set); two images offer Blend; a text layer offers Illustrate. Aspect and Count sit in the bar's … row — generations are no longer stuck at 1:1. A ✦ button next to the sentence asks AI to rewrite it for what you're making; pick Claude or Gemini for that in Settings › AI.

Shots and Why. Every generation lands in Shots, kept until you say otherwise, with a live card for jobs still running. Why on any shot opens its full story — model, prompt, references, camera, seed, cost — and Regenerate / Vary ×4 run it again from there.

Storyboard. A row of frames in order, with a ✦ fill between any two — a short clip that gets you from one frame to the next.

The Assistant talks, the bar makes. Ask the Assistant to do what the bar does — "take three angles and put a clip between each" — and it calls the same verbs, in one turn, with the same undo.

068 September 2026

Load Unique UV. The output strip Camera tab is always there. Load (or drop) one Unique UV frame per projector into Before; the desk button reads Calibrate. After and Both still compare the Look you picked.

077 September 2026

Camera Before / After. The output strip Camera tab shows Before, After, and Both. Those frames show the Look you picked — Pattern, the .omni, or a still — not a blank white plate. Outputs stays the warped, blended feed you send to each lamp.

Output windows carry the blend. A desktop output window (double-click a thumbnail) is already faded and warped. Push sends the same map to players.

New project layouts. The projector-rig wizard now includes 6 × 1 next to 2 × 1, 3 × 1, 4 × 1, and 2 × 2.

085 September 2026

Undo covers 3D now. Ctrl+Z used to skip materials, lights, meshes, repeaters, fields and effectors — those edits stuck even after undoing everything else. All of them are undoable in one consistent stack now, including a value field's own Restore default (↺) action. A slider drag and a take delete are each one undo step, and undoing right after typing a number no longer gets swallowed.

Materials on imported models. A .glb's own materials show up as editable parts, by name, with the file's textures kept — no more all-or-nothing overrides. Wireframe, Points, flat/smooth shading, Two Side and per-texture tiling now apply to imported models the same way they do to primitives, and a scene-wide Clay / Wireframe / X-ray shading mode is on the 3D toolbar for lighting work. Read Materials.

Directional light and shadows. The shadow camera now fits the actual scene instead of a fixed small box — the falloff at the screen edge and the short reach are gone. Added Exposure, Tone mapping, a Fill light so unlit faces aren't pure black, and an AO strength next to AO radius. HDRI background now reloads after being hidden and shown again, and gained Rotation, Blur and Brightness. Read Lights & environment.

Camera & focus. Front / Left / Top are real Orthographic views now (they still return to Perspective once you orbit). Pressing F or Zoom to selection frames the selected object's actual bounds instead of the whole canvas, a small axis gizmo sits in the corner of the 3D viewport, and a minimal coordinate readout lives in the view bar. Read Focus & navigation.

Auto Key. A record toggle on the transport turns property edits and canvas drags into keyframes as you make them. Keyframes get a Delete button (dopesheet, graph editor and the ◆ control, not just the Delete key), and Hold on the last key of a curve is disabled instead of silently doing nothing. Read Animation.

Rules in the editor. When/Do rules that fire while you're still editing can now be rewound with a Reset scene button on the transport, and Preview opens the scene as it was before those rules ran. Read Interactions.

Smaller fixes. A scale lock (⛓) keeps X/Y/Z proportional; artboards now always stay behind other layers; Flow connections anchor correctly at an artboard's edge instead of drifting off it at odd zoom levels.

This round of fixes came from a design pass by Eray Kutlar — thank you for testing carefully enough to catch all of this.

094 September 2026

Responsive & Screens. An artboard has a Fit — new ones are Fluid and become the window when played. Every layer inside an artboard has a Responsive section on Transform: a pin box, Scale as a fifth rule, width and height limits, Keep ratio, and Contents on groups. Dragging a Fluid artboard's handles previews the design at that size instead of editing it; W × H and ⇄ beside the new screen chips do the same by number. Screens (Desktop, Phone, and more from +) hold a different arrangement of the same layers, switched by window width or portrait orientation. Read Responsive & Screens.

Settings. A gear in the top bar (Ctrl+,) opens one window for theme, canvas, panels, shortcuts, the AI model, your account and storage. Old scattered preferences moved there; nothing you had set is lost.

Projects hub. Starter presets no longer live in the code: the studio publishes Starters from its own dashboard (a .omni plus a cover), and they open as new projects. Each project card also has a Cover button: pick any image as the card's picture; Auto cover returns to the last canvas view.

Screens in sentences. A Screen becomes trigger (any screen, a named one, or Portrait / Landscape), and a Screen group in the source picker: Screen width, Screen height, Screen aspect, Portrait, On screen — the last one made for Guard.

103 September 2026

Save is not a download. Ctrl+S writes the open project in this browser. Export → Project file (.omni) is the file you send: scene plus assets, gzipped. Legacy .ntpackv3 files still open in the studio. OmniPlayer plays .omni directly.

Projects hub. Search, Import, New project, starter presets, local storage on this machine. Drop a .omni on the page to add it to the library.

Panels. Three buttons in the top bar show or hide Layers, the timeline and Properties (Ctrl+\ · Ctrl+/ · Ctrl+.).

Timeline views. Tabs are named Keys · Curves · Film · Sequences · Scroll. The Scroll rail zooms with Alt+wheel and pans with Shift+wheel; ⤢ 100% shows the whole range.

Sound. Clips sit on the timeline (♪ + Audio, or ♪ on a file in Files): drag to move, edges to trim. A sentence can Play sound / Stop from Files without a track.

3D. Mesh sections are Model / 3D Text / Geometry. Materials stay off imported models. Clones and Field are the names in + Add. Environment splits Look and Render quality. Double-click focuses a scene; Esc leaves. Field has Show area.

This guide. Category structure (Start, Design, Effects, Animate, Interact, 3D, Sound & data, AI, Publish, Reference), search in the sidebar, an on-page contents list, and a type label on every page. Fifty effects have family pages with parameter tables. Virtual Repeat, Text animation and Bones & deform have Design pages. Mask, Scroll Participation, the artboard Scroll rows, Constraints, boolean ops, and Spawn / Destroy are written. Right-click Add documents Mesh here, Light here and Bone here. Scene group, ∿ Drive / ⇥, page playheads, Expose, the runtime host API, retrigger / On Variable watches, and the layer context menu are written.

11Earlier

The five original chapters — interface, drawing, properties, animation, interactions — were rewritten into this structure. Their screenshots and shortcut tables are still the base of Start, Design, Animate and Interact.