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Your first project

Everything in Kitly lives inside a project: a plain folder on disk with a predictable layout. If you've worked in Houdini or any structured pipeline, it will feel familiar.

The Project Launcher

Whenever no project is open, Kitly shows the Project Launcher: the logo, the tagline, and two panels.

  • Open a Project has a Browse button and a list of recent projects (up to 20). Entries whose folders have gone missing appear disabled.
  • Create a New Project is where you start fresh.

Create a project

  1. Under "Create a New Project", set Location with Choose.... This is the parent folder your project folder will be created inside.
  2. Enter a Project name. The placeholder suggests something like "Tropical Raceway".
  3. The Folder name fills in automatically as a cleaned-up version of the name (lowercase, no spaces). Edit it if you want.
  4. Add a Description if you like. It's optional.
  5. Click Create Project.

The project opens straight into Sandbox Mode. Later you can create or switch projects with New Project (Ctrl+N) and Open Project (Ctrl+O), or return to the Launcher with Close Project (Ctrl+Shift+W).

The folder layout, in artist terms

Kitly organizes the project the way a studio pipeline would, by media type, with source material kept apart from generated results:

images/    source, generated, references, masks, model_sheets
geo/       source, generated, variants, proxy, exports
tex/       source, materials, variants, atlases, spritesheets, tilemaps
audio/     source, generated
video/     source, generated
text/      generated
render/    previews, turntables, contact_sheets, viewport_captures
scenes/
scripts/
exports/
library/
workflows/

A few translations:

  • source folders hold what you bring in: plates, scans, recorded footage, reference photos.
  • generated folders hold what Kitly makes for you.
  • render/turntables and render/contact_sheets are exactly what they sound like: turnaround renders and review sheets.
  • workflows/ stores your saved node graphs.

The file project.cgproj at the root is the project file itself. A hidden .cgasset/ folder holds Kitly's internal bookkeeping: asset records, thumbnails, lineage. Leave it alone, and include it in backups.

No autosave, by design

Kitly doesn't run a periodic autosave. Instead, every action that changes your project writes to disk immediately and safely. There's no "unsaved project" state to lose, and nothing to remember to save (workflow graphs are the one exception, and they prompt you).

Importing your own files

You don't have to generate everything. Bring in plates, models, and audio any of these ways:

  • Drag files from your file manager onto the Files panel.
  • Use the burger menu's Import Assets... to pick media files.
  • Press Ctrl+V to paste an image or text straight from your clipboard into the project.

More on how imported files relate to Kitly's asset system in Assets and files.

Next step

Most generation runs in the cloud, which needs a provider key. Set that up in Connect providers.