The SmarterToons User Guide

Sign up with just an email address and a password (at least 8 characters). There's no separate email verification step to get through — you land straight in the Studio, on an empty dashboard, ready to create your first universe.

If someone shared a referral link with you (a URL containing /r/ and a code), open it before you register — it's remembered automatically and applies their referral relationship to your new account. There's nothing to type in by hand for that part.

Signing back in later just takes your email and password. If you've turned on two-factor authentication, you'll also be asked for a 6-digit code from your authenticator app — see Account and security below.

The dashboard is the first thing you see after signing in. It gives you a single-glance summary of your account: how many universes you've created, your current credit balance, and how many episodes you have in total.

Below that, three live panels track your work as it happens: a breakdown of your episodes by status (draft, generating, under review, published, failed), an approval queue for anything waiting on your sign-off, and a live activity feed that fills up in real time while a generation job — a script, a video render, narration — is running.

In SmarterToons, a "universe" is a project: it holds every character, the series bible, and every episode that belongs to it. Everything about a universe stays consistent from the moment you create it — that consistency is the whole point of the platform.

Creating one takes a short wizard: name it, then optionally set its Style DNA — a color palette and reference images that define its visual identity. You can skip Style DNA at creation and add it later from the project page.

Every character has a DNA workspace built around one problem: keeping them looking and sounding exactly the same across dozens of episodes. It starts with a master reference image — generated from the character's name and bio — that becomes the visual anchor everything else is checked against.

Once you're happy with a character's reference, you can lock it at one of four consistency tiers, from 1 (loose) to 4 (strict). Locking is permanent — a locked character's reference can no longer be regenerated — so it's worth waiting until the design is right.

Beyond the reference, each character carries a bio, an optional voice profile (an ElevenLabs voice ID used for narration and dubbing), age or stage versions for characters who change over a series, and relationships to other characters in the same universe.

As a universe grows past a couple of characters, the Relationships tab visualizes how everyone connects — siblings, rivals, mentors, whatever you define — as a graph rather than a list. It's a quick way to sanity-check a cast before you start writing episodes that depend on those relationships.

The series bible is your universe's source of truth: its tone, its world rules, and a running list of canon facts. Tone and world rules are free text — write them the way you'd brief a human writer, since that's effectively what they do: every episode's generation reads them.

Canon facts are more structured. Each one is a short statement, optionally tied to a specific character and to a status for that character (alive, deceased, and so on). Before generating an episode, you can run a pre-check against a chosen set of characters — it flags anything that would contradict an established canon fact, before you spend credits generating something you'd have to throw away.

An episode starts as a number, a title, and a summary — the summary is the seed the generator turns into a full script and storyboard. Generation produces a shot-by-shot storyboard automatically; how many shots you get depends entirely on how the story breaks down, so a longer or more eventful summary naturally produces more shots.

Generation and video rendering are billed separately, on purpose: writing a script and storyboard is comparatively cheap, while rendering real video per shot is the most expensive step in the whole pipeline. That split means you can iterate on a script for very little before committing to a full render.

Once an episode is generated, its shots land on a 9-track timeline that you're free to rearrange. Each shot can be reassigned to a different character, moved to a different track, or regenerated individually if a single storyboard image doesn't work — you don't need to regenerate the whole episode to fix one shot.

Rendering animates every storyboard image into real video, shot by shot. It's a separate, explicit step from generation — and the one place where iterating gets expensive, since it bills per shot rather than once per episode. A render already in progress is idempotent: re-triggering it never re-renders a shot that's already done, so you can safely retry if only some shots came through.

Narration turns an episode's summary into a spoken English voiceover. Dubbing takes that same narration and redubs it into another language while preserving its timing — so a dubbed episode's audio still lines up with the video underneath it, rather than running long or short. You can dub into as many languages as you need, one request per language.

A universe can define an approval workflow — an ordered sequence of steps, each requiring sign-off from a specific team role (writer, animator, reviewer, and so on). If an episode has approval steps defined, every one of them has to be approved before it can be published; an episode with no steps defined can be published without conditions.

Publishing makes an episode visible to your audience. It's a deliberate, final action distinct from every step before it.

SmarterToons doesn't stream or distribute your episode itself — export assembles the rendered shots and narration into one downloadable video file, which you then publish wherever you actually want your audience to watch it. Exporting costs one export token per episode, purchasable from the Store.

Every file your universe produces or you upload — reference images, storyboards, rendered video, narration audio — is tracked in one provenance and rights registry. Each asset records whether it was AI-generated, uploaded by you, or licensed, so you always know exactly where a piece of media came from.

A similarity check is available to flag exact duplicates already on the platform, useful before you upload a reference image you're not sure is original.

Once episodes are published and real viewers watch them, Analytics fills in with retention (how far viewers get through an episode before dropping off), character popularity across every episode they appear in, and thumbnail A/B results if you're testing more than one. It stays empty until there's real viewing data — nothing here is ever estimated or filled in artificially.

Invite writers, animators, and reviewers into a universe by email — they need an existing SmarterToons account. Each invitee gets one of those three project roles, which determines which approval steps they can sign off on. An invitation stays pending until the invitee accepts it from their own account.

SmarterToons exposes a public REST API for reading your projects, characters, and episodes, and for recording analytics events — available to accounts on an active Basic or Premium subscription. Every key is scoped to only the permissions you select when you create it, and can optionally be marked sandbox, meaning it behaves like a normal key but never spends real credits — ideal while you're building an integration.

Outgoing webhooks let your own HTTPS endpoint get notified the moment something happens, instead of you having to poll the API. This page also keeps a running log of your most recent API calls.

Alongside monthly subscriptions, the Store sells one-off purchases: extra credits, a short Premium pass, a single 4K episode render token, an export token, or an extra character slot. Pricing is set deliberately above the equivalent subscription usage, so a regular subscription stays the more rational choice for anyone using the platform consistently — the Store exists for occasional, one-off needs.

At checkout, there's a promo code field: enter someone's coupon code there (not their referral link) to get 20% off that purchase — the same discount you'd get by following their referral link directly.

Every account gets a personal referral link and can create its own coupon codes. Anyone who buys a subscription or a one-off purchase using your link or code gets a 20% discount, you earn a commission on the net amount they paid, and — two levels deep — whoever referred you earns a smaller commission on the same purchase.

A new commission stays pending for a short retention window before becoming payable, at which point you can request a payout to a wallet address.

AdStudio is SmarterToons' own advertising marketplace: it sells ad placements on the SmarterToons site itself — home banner, sidebar, in-content, video pre-roll, and episode sponsorship slots — priced per thousand views, per click, or as a flat rate.

Every creative is screened automatically before it goes live: content is checked against a policy list, and the destination URL is scanned for threats. A clean creative goes live the moment it's paid for; a flagged link enters manual review; anything that fails outright is rejected automatically. A campaign that's already live can still be pulled later if it turns out to violate policy.

A floating assistant is available from every page in the Studio — the chat-bubble button in the bottom-right corner. It's a general-purpose, AI-powered assistant that knows how SmarterToons actually works end to end, so you can ask it anything about the platform, or about anything else, in plain language instead of hunting through documentation.

It only shows you real information: it never invents figures. If you're an admin or owner, it can also answer questions about your business's real numbers — regular accounts never see that data, even by asking.

The Settings page covers your email, your interface language, and your password. To change your password, you need to enter your current one first — there's no way around that, even if you're already signed in.

Two-factor authentication is available and optional: enabling it walks you through scanning a QR code with an authenticator app, and gives you one-time backup codes to save somewhere safe in case you ever lose access to that app. Once it's on, every login asks for a fresh 6-digit code in addition to your password.