The Kubock Guide

Introduction

Kubock is an AI studio for filmmakers, showrunners and animators. You write, concept, storyboard, edit and export — all in one place. It is designed around production, not one-off prompts.

This guide will walk you through every mode and every trick. If you only read one section, read Project-based thinking — it is the one decision that shapes everything else.

Project-based thinking

Most AI tools give you a shelf of models and a rolling feed of generations. Prompt, result, scroll, forget. That works for a single shot. It falls apart the moment you try to make something that takes more than an afternoon.

Kubock is the opposite. Everything lives inside a project. A project has as many canvases as you want — one per sequence, one per character study, one per mood board — and those canvases share a library, an asset pool and a cast of aliased characters.

Why this matters:

• Design a character once. Reference it by name across every canvas.
• A screenplay loaded in Script mode feeds shot lists into the canvas.
• Two weeks later the project remembers what you decided.

On the landing page, every card is a project. Click one to open it and see the canvases inside.

Your first canvas

Once you are inside a project, hit New Canvas and you land in an empty infinite canvas in Node Canvas mode. From here, every mode is one key away.

Three ways to place a node:

• Right-click anywhere on the canvas and pick from the context menu.
• Press a number key over the canvas: 1 text, 2 upload, 3 image generate, 4 video, 5 audio, 6 voice, 7 upscale, 8 describe, 9 AI chat.
• Drag an asset from the Library panel straight onto the canvas.

Pick a favourite model

Kubock ships with 20+ image and video models. You probably use two of them 90% of the time. Every model list — image, video, audio, voice — has a little star on the right.

Click it and that model becomes your favourite: the one that opens by default whenever you create a new Generate node, or the one Swift boots into. Only one favourite per category. Click again to unset.

Your favourites are stored per-user, so they follow you across projects and devices.

Node Canvas

The heart of Kubock. An infinite canvas where you wire prompts into generators into results. It is where most of the work happens.

How to enter: default view, or press Shift+F1.

Typical flow:

• Place a Text node and write your prompt.
• Place a Generate node, pick a model (Flux, Seedream, SD with LoRAs, etc.) and wire the text into it.
• Hit Run — a result node appears to the right with your images.
• Drag the result into another generate node as a reference, or into a video node to animate it.

Navigation: hold Space to pan, V for select tool, H for hand (pan) tool, +/- to zoom, C to center on the selected node.

Swift

A rapid-fire feed for visual exploration. Write a prompt, generate four images in parallel, pick the one you like, run again. Perfect for the early part of a production when you are still hunting for a look.

How to enter: Shift+F3.

How it works:

• Type a prompt at the bottom, hit Enter to generate. Shift+Enter for line break.
• Click any image to reuse it as a reference on the next run.
• Everything lands in your Library automatically.
• You can generate 2, 3 or 4 images per run — adjust from the count toggle.

When Stable Diffusion is the active model, the Swift bar hides the LoRA and checkpoint chips behind a single Checkpoint + button next to the model picker. See Checkpoints & LoRAs for what lives inside it.

Split

Canvas on one side, Swift on the other. Ideal when you are iterating in Swift and want to drag the best shots straight onto your canvas without switching views.

How to enter: Shift+F2. Drag the divider to resize.

Script

Drop a screenplay (Fountain, FDX, TXT or paste). Kubock breaks it into scenes with heading and time of day, extracts cast into lead / supporting / minor tiers, pulls out locations and props, and generates a shot list per scene.

How to enter: Shift+F7.

Each shot card can be sent straight into the canvas as a prompt, turning the script into a visual world one card at a time.

Image Editor

A lightweight editor for the tweaks you would otherwise make in Photoshop thirty times a day. Levels, curves, warmth, highlights, shadows. Brush and eraser. AI-powered inpainting for fixing a face or wiping an object.

How to enter: double-click any image in the canvas, or press Shift+F4. Save returns you to the canvas with the edit applied.

Rough Cut

This is where your clips find their rhythm. Drag video and audio onto tracks. Trim edges, razor, rearrange. See real waveforms on the audio tracks so the pacing is honest.

How to enter: Shift+F5.

Export: Rough Cut is for pacing, not colour grading. When you are happy with the structure, export FCPXML or XMEML and finish the cut in Premiere, Final Cut or DaVinci.

Library

Every generation is kept. Prompt, model, aspect ratio and origin canvas attached to each file. Search, filter, tag, favourite, bulk-select. Assets cross projects freely — design a character once, pull it into any production.

How to open: Shift+F8 or the Library button in the sidebar.

Checkpoints & LoRAs

If you generate with Stable Diffusion (SDXL, Pony, Illustrious, NoobAI) you will live here. Paste a Civitai URL to import a checkpoint or a LoRA — Kubock grabs the metadata, trigger words and preview automatically.

How to open: Shift+F9 or the SD button in the sidebar.

Using a LoRA in the canvas:

• Place a Generate node and pick an SD checkpoint.
• In the same node, add a LoRA slot and pick one from your library — the trigger word is inserted into the prompt automatically.
• Adjust strength per LoRA (0.0 – 1.5).

Checkpoint + (Swift)

In Swift the SD controls used to clutter the bar. Now they live behind a single Checkpoint + button, next to the model selector. Click it to open a wide popover split into two columns:

• Left column: checkpoint picker and LoRA slots (inline — no extra popup).
• Right column: Negative Prompt, Sampler, Scheduler, Steps, CFG Scale, Seed.

Only LoRAs compatible with the selected checkpoint's base model appear in the picker, so you cannot accidentally mix an SDXL LoRA with a Pony checkpoint.

Advanced controls

Same controls in both Swift and the Generate node. In nodes they sit behind an Advanced accordion; in Swift they live inside Checkpoint +.

• Negative Prompt — SD only. What you don't want in the image ("blurry, extra fingers, text"). Kept separate from the main prompt so your positive prompt stays clean.
• Sampler — the algorithm that denoises the image. Euler a is a safe default. Also available: Euler, Heun, DPM++ 2M, DPM++ SDE, DPM2, DDIM, LCM.
• Scheduler — the pacing of the denoise. Normal is the default. Also: Karras, Exponential, SGM Uniform.
• Steps — how many passes the sampler runs. More steps = more detail, slower. 28 is a fine starting point; LCM samplers need as few as 4-8.
• CFG Scale — prompt adherence. Low values (3-5) give softer, more creative images. High (8-12) sticks tighter to the prompt. 6 is a good middle ground.
• Seed — leave blank for random. Paste a number to reproduce an exact image, or lock a seed while you tweak other parameters.

Prompt Styles

A style is a small bundle of tokens — "cinematic, backlit, 35mm, shallow depth of field" — that you want to append to many prompts without retyping.

How to open: Shift+F10. Create styles, group them, and invoke them inside any prompt with /s.

Prompt Library

Save the prompts you come back to — your go-to character sheet prompt, your favourite establishing-shot prompt, your vfx test prompt. Recall them with /p from any textarea.

How to open: Shift+F11.

Aliases: @ # $

Aliases are the superpower that makes Kubock a production tool instead of a prompt box. They let you write @clara in any prompt and Kubock inserts every image of Clara — no cables, no copy-paste.

The three prefixes

• @ — characters and references (images)
• # — locations and beats (text)
• $ — styles and looks (text)

How to create one

On a single node: open the node, type an alias in the alias field. Now @that_name in any prompt in the project pulls its content.

On a group: title a group starting with one of the three prefixes, e.g. @main_cast. Every image node inside the group now feeds that alias, in top-to-bottom reading order.

Aliases work across every canvas in the project. Define once, use everywhere.

Cast & Assets panel

A floating panel that shows every alias in the current project at a glance.

How to open: Shift+F6, or the people icon in the top toggle bar.

Three tabs — @ Characters, # Locations, $ Styles — each with a thumbnail grid of every aliased node and group in the project. Click an item to preview the asset. Use it when you have lost track of which characters you have already designed, or when you want to confirm a name before typing @clara into a prompt and getting nothing.

The panel is read-only — to edit an alias, jump back to its canvas.

Slash commands

Any prompt textarea in Kubock — text node, generate node, swift prompt bar — supports two slash commands:

• /p — insert a saved prompt from your Prompt Library.
• /s — insert a style from your Prompt Styles.

Navigation inside the dropdown: ↑ / ↓ to move, Enter to insert, Esc to close. You can also click with the mouse.

Groups

Groups are for two things:

• Visual order — corral a scene, a character study, a mood board inside a titled box.
• Multi-image reference — every group has a green out-images port on the bottom-right. Wire it into a video node or a multi-ref generator and it expands into every image inside, in reading order.

Pair with aliases (see above) and a group titled @moodboard becomes a named bundle you can pull into any prompt.

The selection toolbar

Select two or more nodes and a small floating toolbar appears above the selection. It exposes a few actions that all save you a copy-paste-arrange chore:

• Create Group — wraps the selection in a titled group. Use the title as an alias (@cast, #location, $style) to turn it into a multi-image reference.
• Make Grid — only shows when every selected node is an image. Lays them out in a tidy grid in place, ready to wire into a video node or a multi-ref generator.
• Generate All — only shows when the selection contains generator nodes. Runs every one of them in parallel. The number in brackets tells you how many will fire.
• Tidy — auto-arranges the selection in a clean grid, in selection order. Great when you have wired up ten messy nodes and want them lined up before screenshotting or grouping. Select a single group and Tidy rearranges its children instead, expanding the group's box if it has to.

The toolbar disappears as soon as you click anywhere else.

Notes

Sticky notes for everything that is not a prompt — a reminder, a TODO, a comment for the director, the seed that finally worked, the reason you picked one take over another. Coloured textareas with a palette of six tints.

Free-floating notes

Right-click on any empty area of the canvas and pick Add Note. It lands where you clicked and you drag it wherever you want. Use it for ideas that belong to the canvas as a whole, not to a specific shot.

Linked notes

Right-click directly on a generated image or video and pick Add Note. This note is born with a yellow top border and is glued to its parent node — it sits right underneath and follows it wherever the parent goes. If the parent grows (auto-fit after a longer prompt), the linked note slides down automatically to stay below it.

Two things to know:

• You cannot drag a linked note on its own. Clicking it only selects it. To move the pair, drag the parent node.
• To break the link, delete the note and create a new free-floating one.

Typical uses: record the exact prompt that worked, note a version to revisit, park a director's comment next to the take they reacted to.

Media actions

Right-click on any image or video in the canvas and you get a context menu of things to do with that media — download, copy, send to edit, send to rough cut. Two of those deserve a closer look because they open up production tricks you would otherwise need a separate tool for.

Convert GIF to Video

Right-click on an animated GIF and a Convert GIF to Video option appears. It only shows up when Kubock detects real animation (by reading the file's frame blocks), so it never clutters the menu for static GIFs or regular images.

Click it and the GIF is converted to an MP4 entirely in your browser using FFmpeg — nothing is sent to a server for the conversion. The resulting video node lands on the canvas next to the original, ready to drop into the Rough Cut timeline, use as a video reference, or chain into any other video operation.

Why this matters: animated GIFs are a classic source of looping motion (reaction shots, cycle animations, references scraped from the web) but most editing and AI tools need real video files. This turns them into usable MP4s in one click.

Extract Last Frame

Right-click on any video in the canvas and pick Extract Last Frame. Kubock grabs the final frame of the clip (one frame before the absolute end, to avoid the black frame some encoders put at EOF), uploads it, and places an image node right next to the video.

The point is continuity. Wire that new image into the First Frame input of another video node and the next generation starts exactly where the previous one ended — no jump cut, no drift in character design, no re-describing the scene. Chain several of these together and you can stitch a long sequence out of short AI-generated clips without visual seams.

Pairs well with image-to-video models like Kling, Runway or Veo that honour a first frame strictly.

Pin canvases to the top

In a project with many canvases, the ones you are actively working on get buried fast. Open the three-dot menu on any canvas card and pick Pin to top. Pinned canvases float above the rest, in pin order, with an orange thumbtack next to their name so you can spot them at a glance. Pick Unpin to put a canvas back in the normal flow.

Pinning is per-project and saved on the server, so it follows you across devices.

Favorites

Pin to top is great inside a project, but sometimes you want a canvas accessible from anywhere in the app — the master shot list, the character bible, the timeline you keep reopening. That is what Favorites is for.

Open the three-dot menu on any canvas card and pick Pin to Favorites. The canvas appears in the Favorites section of the sidebar, available from every dashboard page (home, library, LoRAs, etc.). Pick Unpin from Favorites to remove it. Up to 20 favourites at a time.

Favorites are stored per device — they do not follow you across browsers or machines. Use Pin to top inside a project if you want something synced.

A Recents section right below shows the last ten canvases you opened, also per device, so a canvas you visited five minutes ago is one click away even if you forgot to favourite it.

Keyboard shortcuts

From outside a canvas — the Library, LoRAs, Prompt Styles and so on — Shift+F1 through F7 teleport you back to the last canvas you worked on, opened in the mode you pressed. Shift+F8 through F12 always go to the sidebar pages.

Switch modes

Add nodes at the cursor

Canvas

Undo and redo also work inside the Image Editor and Rough Cut.

Prompts

Saving & autosave

You do not need to press save. Kubock autosaves the canvas continuously — on every node add, delete, drag, resize and connection. It also saves the moment a generation finishes so an F5 never eats your last result.

Names, project settings and library changes sync as soon as you stop typing. Your work follows you across devices.

Bring your own keys

Kubock is built around BYOK — Bring Your Own Keys. You plug your own API keys into Profile (fal.ai, Civitai, OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, ElevenLabs) and generations bill directly to your providers, at their rates, no markup.

Keys are AES-256 encrypted before they ever reach the database.

You can add keys on the Profile page. Kubock tells you exactly which features each key unlocks.

Mature content (NSFW) toggle

Civitai bills through two different accounts depending on the content rating, and Kubock lets you choose which one you are spending from. Scroll down in Profile to the Content section:

• OFF (default) — generations stay SFW and bill Buzz from your civitai.com account. Adult outputs are blocked or blurred by Civitai.
• ON — NSFW outputs are allowed and generations may bill Buzz from your civitai.red account.

The toggle only affects Stable Diffusion (Civitai) generations. Flux, Seedream, Nano Banana and every non-SD model are unaffected.