Documents, pages, layers
How a project is structured, and what belongs at each level.
A document is the file. It holds one or more pages, and each page holds a stack of layers. That is the whole hierarchy — there is no separate project, library or bin to keep track of.
Pages#
A page is a canvas with its own size and its own content. Pages exist so one document can carry a whole campaign: a square post, a vertical story and a wide banner, sharing assets and exported in one pass.
A page can inherit the document resolution or override it. Overriding is the point — pages that all match the document are just slides.
Layers#
Everything on a page is a layer: shapes, text, images, video, 3D objects, particle systems, nulls. Order in the list is paint order, with the top of the list drawing last and therefore on top.
A layer carries its own transform, its own modifier stack, its own effect stack and its own keyframes. Nothing is shared implicitly — if two layers should move together, that is what parenting is for.
Nulls, and why they matter more than they look#
A null is a layer that draws nothing. Its only job is to have a transform that other layers can inherit.
This is the most useful organisational trick in the tool. Parent a group of layers to a null and you can move, rotate, scale or wiggle the whole set as one object without touching any of them — and you can animate the null independently of whatever the children are already doing.
Adding Wiggle to every layer in a scene makes each one wander independently, which reads as chaos. Adding it to a single null that everything is parented to reads as a camera move, because the parallax stays correct.
Groups versus parenting#
A group collects layers into a folder and gives them a shared transform. Parenting links transforms without changing the list structure. Groups are for tidiness; parenting is for rigging. Reach for parenting when the relationship is about motion rather than organisation.