SoCreate – Professional Drawing & Animation Studio for Android

A free, local-first, no-AI, open-source alternative to Procreate Dreams 2

For true professional artists and animators. 100% local storage, no cloud, no subscriptions, no telemetry, no AI features.

Current Status: Functional Phase 1 Core (Drawing Works!)

Major progress since initial skeleton:

• Actual drawing now works! Brush stamps pixels directly into layers using CPU (soft alpha blending with pressure and the provided brush texture).
• Multi-touch pan & zoom (two fingers to pan/zoom the canvas, single finger to draw).
• Tool switching: Brush, Eraser, Fill (tap with fill tool to flood fill).
• Tiled canvas rendering with OpenGL (tiles upload on dirty).
• Basic onion skinning (previous frame ghosts).
• Full local .socreate save/load with the binary format.
• Undo/Redo, frame management, brush size/opacity controls.
• Clean Jetpack Compose UI with floating controls.

This is now a usable basic professional drawing tool on Android. You can draw, erase, fill, save projects, switch frames, and pan around a large canvas.

How to Build & Run

1. Download socreate-functional-phase1.zip (or the source tree).
2. Extract and open in Android Studio (API 29+ / Android 10+ device or emulator recommended).
3. Replace placeholder mipmap icons with real ones (Image Asset Studio).
4. Sync and Run.
5. Use a stylus for best pressure sensitivity.

Important: The current GL projection for tiles is basic/approximate (hard-coded offsets). Lines may appear slightly offset at extreme zoom. This will be refined in the next iteration with a proper MVP matrix.

Next Priorities (Phase 1 Polish + Phase 2)

• Improve tile projection and add proper camera matrix.
• Add color picker (HSV wheel as a circular panel).
• Real brush texture preview.
• Layer system (multiple layers per frame).
• Full onion skin controls + frame duration.
• Move to Phase 2: Gesture-based timeline, real-time playback, X-sheet.

Full Vision

See the comprehensive feature list in the original conversation (TVPaint + Toon Boom Harmony + Rough Animator + circular UI + tiled infinite canvas + predictive smoothing + local collaboration + accessibility + much more).

Everything remains 100% local, no AI, no APIs.

Project Structure

Standard Android + Compose + OpenGL ES 3.0.

GitHub Actions workflow is included for automatic APK builds.

License

GNU GPL v3

Let's keep building the best free pro animation tool for Android artists.

CI/CD & Agent Ramp-Up (this build)

• Full GitHub Actions workflows restored/updated from template: generate-keystore.yml (one-time secret setup using GH_PAT), android-ci.yml (debug builds + tests on push/PR), release.yml (signed releases on tags or manual dispatch).
• New scripts/socreate-cli.sh (Ramp-Up Edition): zip, status, update-readme, prepare-push, full-ramp, agent-sync, build-debug, bump-version.
• README updated with "Working with the Agent" guidance.
• .github/workflows/ now present for immediate use after adding GH_PAT secret.
• Ready for rapid iteration: agent generates changes → you use CLI to prepare → push → CI runs.

Add GH_PAT secret (full repo permissions) in your repo Settings → Secrets. Run the Generate Keystores workflow once.