Core concepts

Five words that mean something specific here. Everything else in these docs links back to this page rather than redefining them.

Render mode

The engine-level identity of a look, stored as state.renderMode. There are 91 unique render modes. A mode is a string like characters, dither, lego or liquidglass, and it decides which renderer draws your pixels.

Style tile

What you click in the left rail. Most tiles map one to one onto a render mode, but a tile can also pin extra parameters on top of a mode, which lets one renderer appear as several distinct looks. The ten glass variants are all the liquidglass mode with a different glassStyle pinned, which is why there are more tiles than modes.

Variant

A curated look within a style: a preset of that style's own parameters. Most styles carry several. When a render is not quite right, asking for a different variant is usually a better move than adjusting sliders.

Post effect

A pass applied after the style has drawn. There are 28, of which 16 are free. They stack in a fixed order that does not depend on the order you switched them on. See Post effects.

Recipe

A look with no image: a delta of every look-bearing setting against its defaults, serialised to a short string like recipe:v1:eyJ2IjoxLC.... Paste one into the editor to reproduce a render exactly. Every PNG the app exports carries its own recipe inside it. See Recipe format.

Credit

Spent on generative renders only. Nothing else in the tool consumes credits, and there is no export cap, no render cap and no watermark. A free account starts with 3. Cost depends on output resolution, so a 1K render is not the same price as a 4K one. See Generative.

The state model

Everything the editor knows about your look lives in one flat object. Not a tree, not a layer stack: a single set of keys, where renderMode picks the renderer and the rest are parameters that renderer may or may not read.

Three consequences worth knowing, because they explain most of the tool's behaviour:

• Switching styles keeps your parameters. Moving from Dither to Halftone does not reset contrast or your post effects, because those keys were never owned by Dither. Only the keys the new mode pins get overwritten.
• A parameter a mode does not read simply sits there. It is not an error and the control may still be visible. This is why Coverage appears to do nothing on modes with no cell grid.
• A recipe is a diff of this object. That is the whole format. See the recipe format.

Dressing

A term you will only meet through the MCP server. The editor hands you a style's raw defaults and expects you to adjust them by eye. An agent cannot do that, so the server dresses a render before it runs: it picks a curated look with its post effects, applies the style's own ground rules, fits the cell size to the image, rescues a badly exposed source, and on Pro adds a Levels grade when the render comes out flat.

This is why the same style can look better from an agent than from a cold start in the editor, and why enhance: false is worth reaching for when you want to reproduce editor defaults exactly. A recipe is never dressed: it is rendered as encoded, which is what makes it reproducible.

Tier vocabulary

Glossary

Last updated 28 September 2026