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Staples are powerful auxiliary tools in Arttista used to organize, select, and manipulate groups of points and objects directly on the canvas, streamlining your editing and animation workflow.

What Are Staples Used For?

The primary purpose of a Staple is to act as a “visual shortcut” for complex selections.

• Selection Convenience: Instead of manually selecting multiple scattered points across the scene every time you need to edit them, you click on the Staple and it instantly selects the entire associated group.
• Points from Different Objects: A Staple can represent any set of points, regardless of whether they belong to the same object or entirely separate objects.
• Facial Animation Organization: They are extremely useful for grouping character facial elements (such as eyes, pupils, mouth, or beard). This makes creating facial expressions, blinks, and lip-sync movements much simpler.
• Invisible in Final Render: Staples appear on screen only during Edit Mode; they are automatically hidden when rendering your final animation.

How to Use Staples?

1. Creating and Linking a Staple

For a Staple to work, it must be linked to a group. The creation workflow is as follows:

1. In Edit Mode, select all the points you wish to group.
2. Select the Staple tool from the panel and click on the canvas to place it on the drawing.
3. Create a new group in the Groups tab. By doing this with the points selected and the Staple in place, Arttista automatically associates the Staple with this new group.

2. Operating Staples on Canvas

Once created, you interact with a Staple in two distinct ways depending on where you click:

• Clicking the circular area of the Staple: Selects all points linked to the group. From this moment, any transformation (such as moving or scaling) applied will affect both the points and the Staple itself simultaneously.
• Clicking directly on the center of the Staple: Selects only the marker tool in isolation. This allows you to move or scale the Staple icon on screen without affecting or moving the actual character points. This is very useful for visually reorganizing controls or changing the Staple’s color to stand out against dark backgrounds.