What "live" means here
Apply Effect ▸ Distort & Transform ▸ Roughen to a star and nothing is destroyed. Rayzia wraps the object in an effect host group and recomputes the result from the original geometry every time something changes. Move the star, edit its corner count in the Star edit bar, recolour it, and the roughening re-runs against the new shape.
The practical consequence is that you can commit early. Add the drop shadow while you are still deciding, because dialling it back later costs nothing. This is the opposite of running a boolean operation, which rewrites the path there and then.
Effects live on the object, not on the layer. Group several objects and apply an effect to the group and you get one effect over the combined artwork, which usually looks different from the same effect applied to each member.
The Effect menu, family by family
The Effect menu is smaller than Illustrator's and every enabled item opens a parameter dialog. These are the families:
- Distort & Transform: Transform, Free Distort, Pucker & Bloat, Roughen, Tweak, Twist, Zig Zag.
- Convert to Shape: Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle, Ellipse. There is no Polygon entry.
- Path: Offset Path. That submenu holds exactly one item.
- Stylize: Drop Shadow, Feather, Inner Glow, Outer Glow, Round Corners, Scribble.
- Warp: fifteen styles (Arc, Arc Lower, Arc Upper, Arch, Bulge, Shell Lower, Shell Upper, Flag, Wave, Fish, Rise, Fisheye, Inflate, Squeeze, Twist), each opening the warp dialog preset to that style.
Two convenience items sit at the top. Apply Last Effect re-applies whatever you used most recently with the same settings and no dialog, which is how you get a consistent shadow across eight buttons. Last Effect reopens that effect's dialog so you can change the numbers first.
There is no Effect ▸ 3D submenu. It was removed deliberately. If a tutorial elsewhere tells you to look for it, that tutorial is describing a different product.
The Appearance stack
An object in Rayzia can carry more than one fill and more than one stroke, with effects interleaved between them. That whole ordered list is the appearance stack, and it is where a two-tone outlined badge comes from: one wide dark stroke, one narrow light stroke on top, one fill underneath, all on a single path.
Open it from Object ▸ Appearance ▸ Appearance…, or from the Appearance tab in the right dock. The same submenu gives you Add New Fill, Add New Stroke, Expand Appearance and Clear Appearance. There is a separate Effects tab in the dock that lists the live effects currently on the selection; it has no menu item, so you reach it from the dock tab strip or the dock's All panels menu.
Once a stack does what you want, save it. The Graphic Styles panel keeps an appearance as a reusable preset (Object ▸ Graphic Styles…), and applying it to a new object reproduces every fill, stroke and effect in one click.
Filters are effects too
Filters ▸ Filter Gallery… opens a browsable gallery, and the Filters menu also injects one submenu per category so you can apply a filter without the gallery. The categories are Bevels, Blurs, Bumps, Distort, Fill and Transparency, Image Effects, Image Paint and Draw, Materials, Morphology, Non-Realistic 3D Shaders, Overlays, Pixel Tools, Protrusions, Ridges, Scatter, Shadows and Glows and Textures. Bevels alone holds around thirty; the whole catalogue runs past two hundred.
Applying one adds an entry to the same appearance stack described above. Filters are not a separate parallel system, which is why you can layer a bevel under a drop shadow and reorder them.
Filters ▸ Remove Filters is a blunt instrument. It fires the same command as Clear Appearance, so it strips the entire stack, including fills, strokes and non-filter effects. If you only want one filter gone, remove that row in the Appearance panel instead.
Expanding, and the point of no return
- Adjust while it is live Reopen the effect's dialog with Effect ▸ Last Effect, or edit the row in the Appearance panel. Change the numbers as often as you like. Nothing has been written into the geometry yet.
- Remove Effect Effect ▸ Remove Effect is deliberately broad: it strips transform, distort, filter and 3D effects in one go, so it works regardless of which kind you applied. Handy when you have lost track, unhelpful when you wanted surgical.
- Expand Effect Effect ▸ Expand Effect bakes the result into real geometry. The roughened edge becomes actual anchor points and the parameters are gone. Do this when you need a plain path for a boolean operation, for an export target that must not depend on the effect engine, or for handing artwork to someone else.
Expand last, always. The habit worth building is to keep a document live through the whole design phase and expand only at the end, on a copy if you are unsure. Undo will walk an expand back while the document is open, but it will not help you next week.
Common questions
Can I reorder effects on one object?
Yes. Effects sit in the Appearance stack alongside the object's fills and strokes, and the order in that stack decides the result. A blur under a stroke and a blur over it look nothing alike.
Does an effect survive export to SVG?
Export writes the rendered result, so what you see is what the file contains. The live parameters are a Rayzia concept. If you want to keep the ability to dial an effect back later, keep the .rzv, which is the native lossless format.
Why does Remove Filters delete my fill?
Because that menu item clears the whole appearance stack rather than only the filter rows. The label overstates its precision. Remove the individual filter from the Appearance panel if you want to keep everything else.
An effect makes the canvas slow. What can I do?
Live effects recompute when their source changes, so a heavy filter on a complex path costs something on every edit. Expand it once you are happy with the look, or apply it to a group at the end rather than to twenty objects individually.