Guide

Pages & layout

Generated frames are the raw material; pages are the deliverable. The Page, Transform, and Comp nodes turn a canvas of shots into finished, exportable comic pages.

A full-bleed splash page exported from FlowBoard: extreme close-up of a sweat-drenched singer's face against neon club signage, beside a speech balloon reading 'You think you're the black cat... but I'm the one sleeping in the jungle.' — A full-bleed splash exported from a Page node — planned in a page plan, cropped with a Transform, finished in the app.

The Page node

A Page is a canvas with panel slots. Pick from twelve preset layouts — full bleed, 2-ups, the 3-up family, 4-up and 6-up grids, two manga-style irregulars, and an inset — or flip on Num Grid and just say how many panels (1–16); the grid shapes itself, keeping cells near-square for your page size.

A finished three-panel comic page: a wide establishing panel of a red Ferrari and a crowd outside 'The Point' nightclub in 1979 Atlanta, over two smaller panels — the club exterior at night and a close-up of sweating hands mid-clap. — A finished page straight from a Page node — one wide establishing panel over two supporting shots, gutters and crops all set in the graph.

Each slot is an input handle. Feed panels from Outputs (generated frames), References (imported art), Transforms (cropped frames — next section), or a Comp. In the properties panel you set the layout, gutter (0–32px between panels), background color, and export dimensions — the preview always shows true page proportions.

The FlowBoard canvas with a Page node named 'The pick' on a Manga 4-Panel layout, four Reference nodes wired into its panel slots, and the Properties panel showing the Num Grid toggle, layout dropdown, 24px gutter slider, background color, and 3000×3000 output size — the script panel open alongside with the scene's beats. — Four references wired into a Manga 4-Panel Page — layout, gutter, background, and export size all in Properties, Export Page on the node.

Export Page renders the composite and downloads it as a PNG at your set dimensions. One page per click; for batch production across a whole act, that's what the flowboard-layout skill is for.

Framing panels with Transform

Left alone, a panel cover-crops its image — fills the slot, trims the overflow, centered. When the automatic crop isn't the right crop, put a Transform between the image and the panel:

Scale (10–200%): 100% shows the whole image letterboxed; zoom in from there.
Offset X/Y (±100% of the panel): pan the crop window.
Rotation (±180°), flip H/V, and opacity.
The 3×3 anchor pad sets where scaling and rotation pivot — anchor a face at the top, zoom, and the crop grows downward from it.

Changes preview live in the connected panel. This is the exact mechanism the layout skill writes for every planned crop — which means machine-planned pages arrive fully hand-tunable:

One page cluster up close: four reference nodes flow through Transform nodes with live scale, offset, rotation, and alignment sliders into the page node's panels — Transforms feeding a page — every crop a live set of sliders.

Compositing with Comp

The Comp node stacks up to four layers — back, mid, fore, ext — rendered in that order onto its own canvas (1920×1080 by default). Feed layers from Outputs, References, FX, Scene captures, or Transforms; give each layer its own Transform for position, scale, and opacity, and you have parallax-ready separation: sky plate behind, environment in the middle, characters in front, effects on top.

Layered separation in motion — background plate, midground set, and foreground elements each on their own layer.

A Comp's composed result flows onward like any image — into a Page panel, or through FX — and Export Comp downloads it standalone. (Layer blending is opacity-only; there are no multiply/screen modes yet.)

A Comp node named 'Black Cat Line' fed by three Reference nodes — Foreground, Midground, Background — each through its own Transform with scale, offset, rotation, and opacity sliders; the Comp's preview shows the two characters composed over the background plate, with a Timeline node keyframing the transforms below — Three layers, three Transforms, one Comp — characters composed over a background plate, each layer's position and scale its own set of sliders (here even keyframed by a Timeline).

Fine print

Change a layout's panel count and its handles reposition automatically — if a wire ever looks attached to nothing, deselect and reselect the node to refresh it; edges pointing at slots the current layout doesn't have are simply ignored. The anchor pad is a pivot, not a crop tool — cropping is scale + offset doing the work. And exports are always PNG, named flowboard-page-<timestamp>.png, straight to your downloads.

Where it fits

Pages close the loop the Script Panel opens: screenplay → graph → frames → pages. For rhythm-planned, whole-act page production — splash placement, panel density, per-panel crops decided from the story — hand the job to the flowboard-layout skill and fine-tune the result here.