Getting Started: Knowing the Interface

Welcome to Brinimate, your in-browser vector animation studio. In this manual (part of our Free Tier), we will guide you from the very basics of our interface to creating incredible animations without ever leaving your browser or installing a single thing.

Brinimate combines the infinite power of vector graphics (which never pixelate) with the meticulous control of a traditional frame-by-frame animation timeline.

🖥️ The Main Interface on Desktop

When logging in from your desktop computer, you’ll find a professional, minimalist, and performance-driven workspace:

Canvas (Center): Your workspace is an infinite canvas. Everything you draw drops here. You can drag, zoom, and pan around freely.
Tools (Left): The main panel that houses your brushes, selection tools, geometric shapes, text creation, and, of course, the vector Pen tool.
Quick Sidebar (Left, collapsible): A menu of frequent actions. It’s ideal for quick opacity adjustments, duplicating, deleting, or moving objects to the front or back of the composition. You can collapse it so it doesn’t get in your way.
Properties / Inspector (Right): Everything you select displays its details here. You can control color fills, stroke sizes, special effects, and manipulate nested Symbols.
Timeline (Bottom): Where the real magic occurs. Here you will insert keyframes, adjust automatic interpolations (Tweens), and dial in the perfect timing for your short film or web animation.

📱 Mobile Mode (Canvas-First)

Brinimate is designed to be the first professional animation editor usable on an iPad or mobile phone. This is why we created our Canvas-First approach:

The Canvas Rules: The canvas remains visible and dominates the screen at all times. No one wants to draw while half their art is hidden by cluttered panels.
Modern Bottom Sheets: The main panels (Timeline, Inspector, Outliner, Assets, and quick menus) open by sliding up as an interactive bottom sheet.
Manual Control: You can quickly close any panel using the X button on its header.
Touch Resizing: To seamlessly adjust the height of a panel (for example, to view more timeline layers), simply drag the upper drag handle up or down.
Auto Collapse: Activate the Auto ON/OFF button to make the controls disappear the moment you touch the canvas to draw.
No Hiding: Tools with many long buttons (like the Timeline) use a smart row “wrap” to ensure you never have to deal with hidden buttons falling out of bounds on a touch screen.

Ready to draw?

Head to our next manual where we will explore the spectacular Vector Brush Engine with its 18+ styles to let your imagination fly without consuming a single wasted megabyte of RAM.