Layers & compositing

Every layer in your project stacks bottom-to-top into one final image — with opacity, blend modes, and mattes deciding how each one mixes with what's beneath it.

Compositing is the moment all your separate pieces — a 2D shape, a 3D scene, a video, some text — become a single picture. DNA stacks them in order, from the bottom layer up, and for each one asks: how strong is it, how should it mix, and is anything masking it? The answers are opacity, blend mode, and track matte.

How content stacks

Think of layers like sheets of glass laid on top of each other. The bottom layer paints first, then each layer above composites over the result so far, all the way to the top. What you see in the viewport is the whole stack flattened.

A few rules shape the order:

• Higher layers sit on top. Move a layer up the stack and it paints later, so it covers what's below.

• Groups stay together. Everything inside a group paints as one contiguous block, just like in After Effects or Figma. Reordering a group moves all its contents at once.

• 3D depth wins in 3D. For real 3D content, what's physically nearer the camera draws in front, no matter which layer it's on. Layer order only breaks ties when two things sit at exactly the same depth. For flat 2D and screen overlays, layer order is the whole story.

So your stack is really two ideas at once: a paint order for flat content, and true depth for spatial content. DNA handles both automatically.

Opacity

Opacity is the simplest control: how much of a layer shows through. At 100% it fully covers; lower it and the layers beneath start to read through.

Fading happens the way your eye expects — a layer at 50% looks genuinely half-strength, not muddy or washed out. Drop opacity to animate a layer in or out, or to gently blend a texture into a scene.

Blend modes

A blend mode changes the math of how a layer mixes with what's below — instead of simply covering, it can brighten, darken, tint, or invert. DNA ships around 50 of them, grouped by what they do:

• Basic — Over (the default), Add, Multiply, Screen, Overlay, Subtract, Difference, Darken, Lighten.

• Contrast — Soft Light, Hard Light, Vivid Light, Linear Light, Pin Light, Hard Mix, Exclude.

• Dodge & burn — Color Dodge, Color Burn, Linear Burn, Divide.

• Stencil & cut-out — Under, Atop, Inside, Outside, Xor, and luminance-based variants for masking with one layer's shape.

• Color — Hue, Saturation, Color, Luminosity (borrow one quality from a layer, like tint without brightness).

• Comparison & effects — Darker/Lighter Color, Glow, Reflect, Heat, Negate, Average and more for stylised looks.

• Erase — punch a hole in everything below.

Every mode mixes in linear light, which keeps highlights and color transitions clean — so an additive glow stays bright and a multiply stays rich instead of going dull at the edges.

Track mattes

A track matte lets one layer control where another layer is visible, using its shape or brightness as a stencil. It's how you confine a texture to text, reveal a layer through a hand-painted mask, or knock content out with an alpha cut-out.

In DNA a matte isn't limited to plain stacking — it can gate any blend mode's strength, not just a straight Over. That means you can have a Screen-mode glow that only shows up inside a masked region, all in one step.

Promoting a node into its own layer

Most of the time content flows down a single chain and lands in one place. When you want a piece of your graph to become its own independent layer — so you can give it its own opacity, blend mode, or matte — you promote it.

Promoting tells DNA to render that branch separately and hand its finished image to the stack as a distinct layer. From there it composites like any other: stack it, fade it, change its blend mode, matte it. This is how a 3D scene, a 2D Expression result, and a video can all live in the same project and still mix on their own terms.

See also

• The graph & cooking

• Colour management

• Fields

• Analytic shapes

• composite.projection