Drawing and editing Faces

"Faces" in Proxima Composer are the building blocks for creating and structuring your visual content. They allow you to draw geometric shapes (squares, circles, custom polygons) and fill them with effects, media, or animations.

In this section, learn how to create predefined or custom Faces, edit their points and curves, and adjust their properties for precise and creative designs.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Creating Faces
  • Predefined faces
  • Custom faces
• Editing faces
  • Manipulating faces
  • Moving points
  • Adding points
  • Adjusting handles

Creating Faces

Predefined faces

To simplify your work if you only need basic shapes, you can use predefined faces. You can either add a square, triangle or circle by drag & drop from the top toolbar or, from a right-click in the work area, you can also add regular polygons with 5 to 10 sides.

Custom faces

To draw a custom face, you first need to enable the Draw tool from the toolbar or with [CTRL/Cmd + F].

To start drawing a shape, click where you want to place your first point on the canvas. To add more points, you have 2 choices:

• Simply click again where you want to place new points, and this will add points with no handles and create straight lines;
• Or click & drag when you add a point, and this will add a mirrored tangent to your new point. This way, you'll create a Bézier curve and you'll be able to adjust your curved path with handles.

When you want to finish a face, simply click on the first point or hit Enter to close your path, or hit Escape to close the path and exit the Draw mode at the same time.

All paths have to be closed, so they need to have a minimum of 3 points (and 1 Center!), but there is no maximum limit. In addition, you can totally mix straight segments and curves in the same face!

Note
Hold [Shift] before clicking to create a new point on the same X or Y axis as the previously created point.

Editing faces

Manipulating faces

Basic manipulation operations and transformations of shapes are described in a dedicated article.

Moving points

You will notice that there is no difference between custom polygons and predefined shapes. Every dot is independent and can be placed as you wish. You can select the points of your shapes independently by simply clicking on them or using a lasso selection. Just like when you select faces, they will turn yellow.

Then, you can move or delete vertices easily. You can even move corners from different shapes at the same time!

If you select one point at a time (a vertex or handle point), as of 1.61 you can input precise pixel values for its X & Y coordinates from the Properties panel (the (0,0) origin point being the top left corner of the canvas).

Note
Faces also have one distinct point, that cannot be deleted and isn't on their outline: the Center +.

Adding points

You can also add points to existing faces. To do so:

1. Turn the Edit Tool on by selecting it in the toolbar, using [Ctrl/Cmd + E] or double-clicking on a face.
2. Select the face you want to add points to. You will see white dots appear in the middle of its segments.
3. Simply click on a middle point to add it to the face. You can also directly add a vertex with mirrored handles if you double-click on the middle point.
4. When you're done editing your faces, simply turn off the Edit tool with Escape or the shortcut, or by deselecting it in the toolbar.

Note
When the Edit mode is on, you can still manipulate all shapes (move or delete faces, points, handles etc).

Note
Know that when you delete only one handle from a point on a curve, it automatically sets the point type to Disconnected.