Node tool

Edit a path point by point: move anchors, shape handles, change node type, add and remove points, and close the path.

The Node tool (A) is the one you live in once a shape exists. It selects and moves the points of a path, pulls their bezier handles, converts corners to curves, rounds them, and joins paths together.

It works on Shape layers. With a Mesh layer selected it edits the mesh cage instead. With nothing suitable selected it falls back to picking layers, so a click still gets you somewhere: click a shape to select it, Shift-click to add, or drag a band across the canvas to pick up every editable Shape layer it touches.

Selecting points#

Click an anchor to select it. Shift-click adds it to the selection or takes it out again. Drag across empty canvas to band-select points: the band only picks up points on layers that are already selected, so you can rubber-band inside one shape without dragging in its neighbours.

Hold Ctrl (Cmd on macOS) and double-click a vertex to select every vertex of that path.

Auto Select#

The Auto Select switch on the bar decides what a click beside the selection does. With it on, the click picks the layer under the cursor, and a menu next to the switch chooses which kind of layer: All Layers, Shape or Light. With All Layers, a light layer lying over a shape does not take the click from it. With Light, a click picks lights only. With Auto Select off, a click only box-selects points and never picks another layer.

Turn on Lasso, near the right end of the bar, to draw a freehand loop instead of a rectangle. It works the same way for points and, when nothing is selected, for layers. A loop that crosses over a docked panel keeps the points drawn there.

Every grab is armed only after about three pixels of movement, so a plain click never nudges geometry by accident and never stamps a keyframe. A band under three pixels with no Shift clears the point selection and the layer selection with it.

When more than one point is selected the bar shows the count; with a single point selected it shows that point's X and Y.

The three node types#

Every point stores its type, so a corner stays a corner even when its handles happen to line up. The pill on the Tool Options bar shows the type of the selected point and converts it, and with several points selected, it converts all of them across every selected shape at once.

A Sharp point does not lose its handles: retracted handles simply sit on the anchor, and pulling one back out gives you the curve again. On canvas the marker tells you the type at a glance: a circle for Smart, a diamond for Smooth, a square for Sharp.

Double-clicking an anchor is the quick toggle between smooth and sharp: it either collapses both handles onto the anchor, or rebuilds them as a smooth curve through the neighbouring points and clears any corner radius.

Moving points and handles#

Dragging an anchor moves it together with both of its handles. If several points are selected they all move, across every shape and layer in the selection.

Dragging a handle reshapes the curve. On a Smart point the opposite handle mirrors; hold Alt to break the tangent and move that one side alone. Alt-dragging out of an anchor is the opposite move: it pulls a fresh pair of symmetric handles out of a corner and clears its corner radius.

You can also drag the curve itself. Press on a segment and pull, and the segment bends to follow your cursor, handy for pushing a belly into a straight line without moving either end. Only the segment you pull changes: the segment on the other side of each node stays as it was, and the node becomes a corner if it has to.

Hold Shift while dragging a point to constrain it to one axis. The axis is picked from the direction you started moving, once the drag passes about four pixels.

Adding, removing and joining#

Hover over a segment of the selected shape and a short tick across the curve shows exactly where a click would put a new point, while the cursor gains a plus sign. Click there to insert the point; press and pull instead and the segment bends. A double-click inserts one point too. On a light layer the new node is added on every path of the light, and on a compound shape it is added on the shape's other parts as well, not only on the first. Split Curve does the same at the midpoint of the segment after the selected point. Select points and press Delete or Backspace to remove them.

To Line and To Curve act on the segments between the selected points, so they need at least two neighbouring points selected. To Line straightens those segments; To Curve gives them handles so they can bend.

The six curve buttons are shared with the Pen tool, and each greys out when it does not apply:

• Split Curve: add a point in the middle of the following segment
• Break Curve: open a closed path at the selected point
• Close Path: close an open path of three points or more
• Simplify: delete excess points from the whole shape
• Join Curves: close the path when both of its endpoints are selected
• Reverse: flip the path direction, which also flips the fill winding and the direction a stroke draws on

Select the open ends of two different paths, on one shape or on two, and a Join Curves button appears on the bar. It joins them end to end into one path, and a second shape is merged into the first. Bone bindings and welds on the joined points keep working. It is not offered when either layer is locked, or when the shape that would be merged has layers inside it.

Simplify#

Simplify deletes excess points. Boolean results now come back already refitted as curves, whether they came from the eraser, the knife, a vector fill or the vector brush, so you no longer have to press it just to get an editable shape. It is what you reach for when you want fewer points than the fit chose, when a stroke traced a lot of small detail, or when you are cleaning up a shape made before that refit existed and carrying several hundred corner points.

What comes back is curves. Simplify does not just throw points away and leave you with a coarser polygon: it refits the outline with bezier curves, and a point is only removed when the handles on the points either side of it can carry the curve it used to describe. The merged boundary of a brushed shape therefore returns as a smooth path that follows the original edge, with real handles you can grab, rather than as a chain of short straight segments.

Keeping the shape is the point, and the node count is what gets spent to keep it. A shape of three overlapping brush strokes measured 232 points; the first press took it to 64 and the new outline never sat more than about a tenth of a pixel from the old one. At normal zoom that is invisible. It is still an approximation rather than a copy, so if you need the exact original, undo.

Corners stay corners. Before anything is removed, Simplify looks for the places where the outline genuinely turns hard and pins those points as Sharp, so a right angle comes back as a right angle and an edge that was straight stays straight, with its handles tucked back onto the points. Everywhere else the new points are typed to match the curve they carry: Smooth where the fit left the two handles in line, Smart where it left them mirrored. A rectangle drawn with two hundred points comes back as exactly four Sharp corners in the same places.

There is nothing to set. The accuracy is worked out from the shape itself, from its own size, so a press means the same thing on a small doodle and on a full-canvas silhouette.

Press it again and it goes further. The first press is the careful one and takes out the bulk of the points. Each press after it allows the outline a little more room to move, so it can find longer curves and drop more points: in testing a brushed shape went 232 points, then 64, then 39, then 30, cutting between a quarter and a third of what was left each time. Press three or four times in a row and you are at the fewest points the shape can sensibly be drawn with.

It cannot run away with your drawing. There is a hard limit on how far the outline may end up from where you drew it, about a third of a percent of the shape's own size, so a small icon and a full-canvas silhouette are held to the same visual standard. In the run above the finished outline stayed well inside that, which is invisible at any zoom that fits the shape on screen. Each press raises both the fitter effort and the tolerance, bounded by a fraction of the shape diagonal. Once a press would cross that limit it does nothing at all rather than loosening further: no change, no History step, and your selection is left alone. That is the tool telling you it has gone as far as it can without altering the drawing.

It works on every selected shape at once, and within each one on the main contour and every extra contour of a compound or boolean shape. No contour is ever dropped, however small. Select a rectangle and the blobs you painted over it, press once, and all of it is cleaned up. It only changes geometry: the layer's transform, anchor, keyframes, animation tracks, effects and style all survive untouched, and the whole thing is one undo step called Simplify Path. Open paths keep both endpoints exactly where they were, so simplifying a line never closes it into a loop.

Your selected points are kept. Simplify renumbers the points of a path, so the selection is rebuilt from where the points were: the ones that survive stay selected, and the ones it removed simply drop out. If a press removes nothing, the selection is left exactly as it was.

Weld Vertices appears with two or more points selected: it welds every other selected point to the first, so they move together from then on, across shapes and across sub-paths. Unweld Vertex removes the welds on the selected points. The separate Weld icon, next to the mode pill, controls dragging: with it on, dropping a point onto another point merges the two structurally, and it forces snapping on while you drag. See Snapping.

Four click modes#

The pill at the far left of the bar decides what a click on the path does.

In Sculpt mode a blue circle follows the cursor and a Radius field appears on the bar, from 8 to 400 screen pixels, 60 by default. Points near the centre of the circle move furthest and the effect fades toward its edge. A press that moves nothing leaves no undo step and no keyframe.

In Line Width mode the slider on the bar sets the width numerically, from 0 to 100 in tenths of a pixel, and applies to every selected point across every selected shape. A width of zero means the point uses the shape's own stroke width.

What the path shows#

Two icons near the right end of the bar change only what is drawn, never what is edited. Curve direction puts arrows along the path to show which way it runs. Selected handles only hides the handles of every point except the selected ones, which keeps a dense path readable. Both are off by default, and the Pen tool has its own separate Curve direction switch.

Corner radius#

With Radius on (the icon next to Weld, on by default), each Sharp corner shows a small handle you can drag along the corner's bisector to round it. The radius is live: it is stored on the point, and the curve is regenerated whenever the shape moves or deforms, so a rounded corner survives editing.

Once any point in the shape has a radius, a Convert to Curves button appears at the right of the bar. It bakes the live radii into real bezier points, which you need when you want to edit the rounding by hand.

The right-click menu#

Right-clicking within ten pixels of a point on a selected, editable shape opens a menu with one item: Start Vertex. It makes the clicked point the first point of a closed contour, which decides where a stroke starts drawing on and where a shape's winding begins. It is offered only on a closed path, and only on a point that is not already the first. A right-click that hits no point does nothing.