The studio
Strokes
A stroke is not a fill with a width. It is a pipeline of stages you can reorder, tune and keyframe, and it belongs to the stroke rather than to the layer.
The pipeline
Every stroke runs the same seven stages, in this order. One brain turns the geometry plus the style into a draw plan, and the canvas, the SVG serializer and the Lottie translator all read that same plan — so a dash offset or a taper cannot mean one thing on stage and another in an export.
| Stage | What it does |
|---|---|
| outline | Turns the path into the shape that will be painted. |
| trim | Draws only part of the length. Start, end and offset are all keyframeable. |
| wave | Displaces the outline along its normal — amplitude, wavelength, phase. |
| dash | Dash and gap lengths, plus an offset you can animate to make it travel. |
| profile | Varies width along the length: taper the ends, swell the middle. |
| paint | Solid, gradient or an image, drawn into the stroke's own shape. |
| caps + markers | End caps, and shapes repeated along the path (arrowheads, dots, ticks). |
Per stroke, not per layer
Trim used to live on the clip, so every stroke on a shape shared one window — which made the signature move of the medium, two or three strokes chasing each other around one outline, impossible to express. Each entry in a layer’s stroke list now carries its own pipeline. Add a second stroke, give it a different trim offset, and the two run the same path independently.
Brushes are stroke presets
Vector brushes are derived from the stroke library, so the 43 looks you can apply to a shape are the same 43 the pen and brush toolsdraw with. Adding a preset makes it a brush too. Only the input half is decided per family: a sprayed line wants loose smoothing, a technical dash wants the path straightened, an inked line wants the hand’s tremor streamlined away.
Text joins the same pipeline
A text layer’s outline is a stroke, not an effect. It gets trim, dash, wave, profile and markers like any other, and converting text to a path keeps its paint.
Keyframing a stroke
Every scalar in the pipeline is keyframe-addressable, so a dash offset, a trim end or a wave phase animates like any other property — with the curve editor, the dope sheet and record mode. See Keyframe anything.