Artwork

Inkweaver uses your PSD files directly. There’s no export step, and no coding involved. Just place your PSD files anywhere in your workspace, and Inkweaver will find them.

Inkweaver can do this because the structure of your PSD is no accident. The layers you’ve created, and the way you’ve organized them, already contain the logic of your artwork. Inkweaver uses this structure as the visual blueprint your novel.

Anatomy of an Image

Inkweaver supports every art tool that can work with the PSD file format, including Photoshop, Clip Studio Paint, and Krita.

Each background and character image should be in its own PSD separate file.

When creating these images you can paint just like you normally would. You can use raster layers, groups, masks, clipping layers, and most blending modes.

Inkweaver will gracefully ignore any feature that it doesn’t understand. Those features (like Smart Objects, or adjustment layers) will eventually need to be flattened, but this can wait until you’re ready.

Ignoring Layers

Inkweaver uses every layer that’s in your PSD, even the ones containing sketches or reference artwork.

If you don’t want to include those layers, you can prefix them with a underscore: _, and Inkweaver will skip those layers entirely.

Variation Sets

Variation sets allow you to design dynamic features, like expressions or scenery changes.

To create a variation set, prefix a layer group with a question mark: ?. All layers inside that group become mutually exclusive, and Inkweaver will ensure that only one of them is visible at a time.

To activate a variation, apply a matching label to the character in the screenplay:

SOPHIA
<trembling>

In this example, any layer named trembling that is inside a variation group be will turned on and all other layers within that group will be turned off. Only the trembling variation will be visible.

Placeholder Slots

Placeholder slots allow you to decide where characters will be displayed in a background.

To create these, simply prefix a layer group with an at sign: @. All layers inside that group become placeholder slots.

To assign a character to a slot, add a matching label to the character in the screenplay:

SOPHIA
<stage-left>

In this example, Sophia’s character will be scaled to fit within the bounds defined by the stage-left placeholder layer.

The actual placeholder layer is never rendered. It’s just there to define the bounds of the placeholder slot.

Note

Most art tools won’t save empty layers, so you’ll need to paint something to fill the space. A mostly transparent fill will do the trick.

Displaying images

Inkweaver automatically selects images by matching scene and character headings to the PSD files that you create. It does this by comparing the words in the headings to the words in the PSD filename:

• Matching words increase the likelihood of a match
• Words that don’t match decrease the likelihood

If Inkweaver can’t find a match, or there are multiple, equally good matches, Inkweaver will tell you when previewing the novel.