Understand layers & the bone rig
How sprites attach to the rig, why draw order matters, and how to reparent a sprite when the auto-snap got it wrong.
Charios's rig is a fixed 17-bone humanoid skeleton. You don't change the bones. You drop sprites onto them and we handle the rest.
The 17 bones
From top to bottom in the layer panel — also the order they're painted on screen, with later bones drawing on top of earlier ones:
| Bone | Description |
|---|---|
| Left upper arm | Off-camera arm. Drawn behind the body so it can hide behind the torso. |
| Left forearm | Off-camera forearm. |
| Left hand | Off-camera hand. |
| Left thigh / shin / foot | Off-camera leg trio. |
| Right thigh / shin / foot | On-camera leg trio. |
| Pelvis | Hip-area sprites — belt, skirt, holster. |
| Neck | Anything between the shoulders and head. |
| Chest | Torso. Drawn after the pelvis so a high belt can sit on top. |
| Head | Head, face, hair, hat — anything from the neck up. |
| Right upper arm / forearm / hand | On-camera arm trio. Drawn in front of the body. |
| Sword | Drawn last so an attack frame reads on top of everything else. |
Why draw order matters
Top-to-bottom in the layer panel = back-to-front on screen. The off-camera arm sits behind the body so it can hide during a turn; the on-camera arm sits in front of the body so a punch reads cleanly. The sword is the very last thing painted so a swing crosses on top of the head silhouette without clipping.
The order is fixed across the whole rig and never changes during animation. This is deliberate — letting bones reorder mid-animation breaks silhouette continuity and looks jarring. If you need a sprite drawn earlier or later within the same bone (e.g. a glove on top of a wrist guard), you can reorder within the bone with ⌘ + ] / ⌘ + [.
What's on each layer row
Hover any sprite row in the layer panel to reveal:
- Eye icon — hide / show. Hidden layers don't render in the editor canvas and don't land in exports.
- Lock icon — locked layers can't be selected on the canvas. Useful for finalised parts you don't want to nudge accidentally.
- Trash icon — delete. The PNG bytes hang around in storage for a daily cleanup pass; if you delete by mistake, undo with ⌘ + Z.
- Layer name — defaults to the source filename. Double-click to rename. Names appear in exports (Unity child name, Godot Sprite2D name).
- Pixel dimensions — intrinsic size of the source PNG. Useful for diagnosing scale issues.
Reparenting
Auto-snap got something wrong? Drag the sprite row onto the bone row where it should live. Charios reparents the sprite and recomputes its bone-local position so the visual on-screen position stays the same — only its pose-following behaviour changes.
Selecting many at once
Click one sprite in the layer panel or on the canvas. Hold Shift and click another to extend the selection. Hold ⌘ + A to select every visible sprite. The floating toolbar that appears over the canvas applies its actions (flip, scale, delete, …) to everything selected.
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