Strokes, Anchor Points, Border Radius & a New UI

👋😁🧀

This week was super busy! I'm ready for the Private Alpha, Lumiere has now a very solid foundation. Subscribe if you're interested!

Next few weeks, the goal is presets and templates. Presets are meant to quickly animate existing objects or assets, while templates are meant to quickly bootstrap a scene from scratch. It has mulitple purposes, show what Lumiere is capable and battle test the editor and the renderer. This works because Lumiere is built like Lego; fully composable pieces that you assemble and customize freely!

The UI will also change a lot. I realized it's hard for non-motion designer to navigate or understand it, so templates and presets are the opportunity to make a beginner-friendly interface!

By the way, if you want to support Lumiere, I set up a Ko-Fi page.

See you next time!

✨ New

• Stroke Support: Shapes now have a stroke (outline) with configurable width and color. Renderer was largely rewritten to support it properly, so it works correctly with every shape type.
• Anchor Point: Each shape now has an anchor point that controls the pivot for rotation and scaling. Set it from the inspector or drag it directly in the canvas via the gizmo.
• Border Radius: Per-corner border radius for rect shapes. A new dedicated input in the inspector lets you set all corners together or each one independently.
• New Shape Tools: Ellipse and star shapes are now available directly from the toolbar. Drawing them works the same way as rect — click and drag on the canvas.
• Dynamic .lumi Imports: A .lumi scene can now import blueprints from another .lumi file in your project and instantiate them directly. Useful for building shared component libraries across scenes.
• Automatic Migration: When you open a project made with an older version of Lumiere, a migration dialog appears and updates the file format automatically before loading.

🛠 Improvements

• Editor UI Redesign: New side panel system, flexible workspace layout, redesigned inspector and file system headers, and a new tooltip component across all controls. The layout is now more composable and handles edge cases better.
• Gizmo & Selection: Improved gizmo interaction — more stable drag behavior, better origin overlay positioning, and more accurate bounding box calculation for all shape types.
• Zoom & Viewport: Zoom handling was refactored to be more predictable when using trackpad gestures and keyboard shortcuts together.
• Animation Engine: Significant internal cleanup of the animation loop for more consistent timing across frame rates.
• Export: Several edge cases in the export pipeline were fixed, including issues with text rendering and SVG paths during frame capture.

🐛 Fixes

• Fixed a crash when duplicating a blueprint that had nested instances referencing each other.
• Fixed stroke and fill rendering order being swapped on SVG shapes.
• Fixed the inspector not refreshing after undoing a transform operation.
• Fixed scene list not updating correctly after renaming a scene.
• Fixed file system state getting out of sync when switching projects rapidly.