User guide

New to the app? Start with the Beginner tutorials for step-by-step projects, screenshots, and editable checkpoints.

The canonical Ortho workflow is Model → Paint → Animate → Save → Export. Release 0.8.0 is a working development baseline; scope details are in COVERAGE.md.

1. Model

• Select a mesh from the outliner or click it in a viewport. Add Cube, Plane, Pyramid, Cylinder or Triangular Prism from the inspector.
• Choose Pick mesh/face/vertex and Select/Move/Rotate/Scale. Colored arrows, rings and box handles provide graphical transforms with world/local movement and rotation, local scaling, independent snap settings, edited-pivot support and one undo entry per gesture. Escape cancels.
• Rectangle-select vertices through depth, then drag with Move. Use the numeric inspector for translation, rotation, scale and pivot.
• Select a face to extrude/delete or change color, textured/shaded/double-sided/draw-behind flags. Mirror and merge are available.

2. Paint

• Choose a swatch, use pen/eraser/fill/line/rectangle/ellipse, and click or drag on the fixed 128×128 indexed atlas. Ctrl-click or Pick color samples an index. Right-click paints with the secondary color.
• Filled shapes, marquee snapshot move/Alt-copy with one-step undo, palette edits, gradients, shade ramps and PNG quantization are available.
• Selected face UVs survive switching from Model to Paint: manipulate their handles or use nudge/rotate/flip/scale/copy/paste controls. UV handles update the real textured model while dragging, without changing saved state until release.
• Navigation — wheel zooms at the pointer; middle-drag or Space+drag pans; +/-/Home zoom/fit the focused atlas. Escape cancels moves, UV edits and pans. The live preview renders the real scene.

3. Animate

• Select a mesh and add Movement / Rotation / Scale / Visibility / Oscillation clips, adjusting one of four tracks. New clips select themselves and use the least populated track.
• Drag a library button into a lane to create a clip at that position. Existing clips drag between tracks; either edge resizes the interval (the left edge holds the original right edge and vice versa).
• Each gesture previews without changing the document and commits once on release; Escape cancels. Timeline snap is adjustable, Ctrl/Cmd temporarily disables it, and locked meshes/folders cannot be edited.
• The inspector exposes track, time, amount, axis, easing, frequency, ping-pong and oscillation property. Scrub by clicking a lane; Play loops the shared timeline — the actual scene preview updates, not merely numeric pose text.

4. Save

• Download an editable .pvo project. Open validates before replacing the document; invalid files are rejected without discarding current work.
• Undo/redo stores up to 60 snapshots. New/Open are undoable in this release (a deliberate browser safety adaptation).

5. Export

• OBJ/MTL/PNG or glTF/bin/PNG are ZIP bundles.
• Texture PNG, rendered PNG, animated GIF and sprite-sheet PNG are actual encoded downloads. GIF/sheets can use a camera turntable or the timeline.
• Frame batches are bounded to 64 MiB, 120 frames and 512px frames; encoding runs on the main thread after rendering, and cancellation is effective during frame capture.

Navigation & shortcuts

Right-drag pans; Alt/middle-drag orbits in perspective and pans in orthographic views; wheel zooms.

Keys	Action
Q / W / E	Pick mesh / face / vertex
V / T / R / S	Select / Move / Rotate / Scale (Model mode)
1 / 2 / 3	Switch modes
Ctrl/Cmd + Z / Y	Undo / redo
Ctrl/Cmd + S / Ctrl/Cmd + O	Save / open

Shortcuts are suppressed in text inputs. Use Help for the full limitations and shortcut list.

Storage & safety

• No accounts, telemetry, cloud uploads or runtime font/icon CDN dependencies.
• A namespaced IndexedDB recovery copy is debounced and offered for explicit restoration on reload; quota/unavailable-storage failures are reported. Save a .pvo copy for reliable persistence — clearing browser site data removes recovery.
• Clear recovery removes the stored copy, not the current document; later edits resume autosave. The iframe preview may restrict storage/downloads compared with running the packaged app directly.
• Mesh and folder locks block geometry, UV, transforms and associated clip edits. Global atlas/palette edits still affect the shared texture. Folder merging bakes base transforms and removes source clips; it is undoable and explicitly reported.
• File size/count limits reject malformed or excessive projects; the app does not execute code from project files.

Themes & typography

• Light/dark theme via the header Moon/Sun button, persisted in pivo-ortho:theme:v1. Theme changes affect only interface chrome and display-only checkerboards — never project rendering, palette colors, geometry, clips or exported pixels.
• Outfit Variable typography and Lucide icons are locally bundled; theme-matched scrollbars use Chromium/WebKit styling with a Firefox fallback.