SoloRender

Tell me what's broken

New Feedback button in the status bar. It opens a form on dexterbrewer.com with the tool and your exact version already filled in — for bug reports and feature requests alike. When something breaks, that's the fastest way to get it in front of me with enough detail to reproduce.

A broken panel is no longer a blank white rectangle. SoloRender's theme only ever lived on a div that React draws, so the instant the panel failed to render — for any reason — you were looking at the browser engine's plain white background, with nothing to go on. The theme now sits on the page itself, so a failure looks like a failure and there's something to report.

Delete sets from the Project tab

• Each row in the Project tab now has a ✕ that deletes that set — from any composition, without switching to it first. Deletion is undoable (Ctrl+Z in After Effects).

Update-check button & smoother scale slider

• Check for updates on demand. A new Check for updates button in the status bar checks dexterbrewer.com for a newer SoloRender right away, instead of waiting for the once-a-day automatic check (the auto-check toggle is now labelled "auto").
• The scale slider no longer runs away. Dragging the panel-scale slider used to re-zoom the whole panel on every tick, sliding the control out from under your pointer. It now previews the size as you drag and applies the zoom when you let go.

Comp tab cleanup & Render Queue fix

• Layers and Sets side by side. The Comp tab now shows your Layers and Sets in two full-height columns instead of stacked half-height panes, so each list gets the whole height of the panel — much less cramping and scrolling. (They wrap back to stacked if you dock the panel very narrow.)
• Queue all / Queue selected now leaves the Render Queue open. SoloRender is queue-only — you press Render yourself — so it no longer hides the Render Queue and makes you reopen it from the Window menu.
• The panel scale control is now a draggable slider instead of the + / − buttons.

Update notifications & What's new

SoloRender now tells you when a new version is out and shows release notes in-panel.

• Update check — once a day, SoloRender checks dexterbrewer.com for a newer version and shows a quiet banner when one is out. Get update opens the download page; dismissing the banner hides that version's notice for good. The automatic check can be switched off with the updates checkbox in the status bar.
• What's new changelog — click the version number in the masthead any time to read the changelog; notes for newer, not-yet-installed releases appear above your installed version.

The Phases 1–4 feature build, plus a usage/install manual (docs/manual.html).

Highlights:

• Robust layer identity — sets track layers by AE's persistent layer id (name/index fallback), so they survive renames and reorders; missing layers get a badge and a one-click "Remove missing" repair. Old sets keep working, no migration needed.
• Timeline integration — add your AE timeline selection to a set, or select a set's layers in AE from the panel.
• Focus / Shy mode — hide all layers unrelated to a set from the timeline, and bring them back with one click.
• Nested precomp variations (experimental) — map a precomp layer to one of its child comp's sets and render the combination (one level deep).

First release of SoloRender — a dockable After Effects panel for saving layer-visibility variations of a comp (sets), previewing them, and batch-rendering each. Verified live in AE 2026.

Highlights: eyeball layer toggles + filter, sets with color labels/rename/duplicate/reorder, preview + restore, per-set thumbnails, queue-to-render + cleanup, a project-wide set manager, Studio Graphite light/dark, and a UI scaler.