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Thread: Couple wishlist features

  1. #11
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    Apr 2015
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    Thought of a new one, an option to make the colored outline of your brush be the same as the selected color you have chosen (cursor matches chosen color, swaps to color picker when holding Alt down to show the dropper appearance). This would make matching my color picks before laying a mark, sometimes even when you color pick you end up with something that is slightly different than what you meant to grab and don't notice until you make the mark, this would reduce that unneeded mark making and undo'ing quite a bit. This is another thing that coupled with the one button tap color picking would make my entire process infinitely faster.

  2. #12
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    Aug 2012
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    Tons of great suggestions from Delofasht here. One I would like to highlight is the paint loading. Particularly for me I'm interested in being able to control more finely when and in what amount paint is loaded on a brush. As suggested, it would be nice to have a shortcut key to hit or a paint well to click to reload paint on a brush. The existing "loading" slider should be sufficient to decide on what loading the brush gets. Along with this, a more gradual (more realistic, I would say) drop-off of paint loading would also be nice; in other words, I want the speed at which the brush loses paint to be slowed (or have a slider that controls how quickly paint is exhausted). As a continuance of that idea, it would be nice to exhaust the paint on a brush and scrub with the un-loaded brush and still be able to lift the brush from the canvas during this time without it reloading.

    Obviously there is a lot more that could be done here (see Delofasht's posts!) to make the painting experience more realistic, and as someone who uses ArtRage because it most closely mimics real acrylic paints, I'm all for going down this route of realism. How about the simple workflow of taking a dry brush and mixing paints and loading the brush? Perfect this simulation in a digital setting and you take away most of the reason I use acrylics at all.

  3. #13
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    Had another thought that I don't think I listed earlier. A pair of hotkeys for swapping between pinned tools on the work bench would be nice, being able to cycle back and forth (next/previous) between tools on my workbench would be quite handy, and an alternative to being able to hotkey individual presets.

    This would make just filling my workbench with various tool presets a quick way to swap between say. . . a mixing knife and a blending knife tool at a press of some fingertips instead of moving my hand over with the stylus to tap one. Which is fine too, but anything to keep my hand more where I want to be working would be nice, I sometimes keep two or 3 tools in one hand in natural media. (Very often 3 or more pencils when I'm working with colored pencils, and sometimes an eraser in my palm as well, very quick swapping without moving away from my paper or canvas)

  4. #14
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    I have been spending a lot more time working in natural media as of late (because I finally have a studio instead of a closet), but sneak back in here to see what is going on whenever a I am able. I have noticed some things that I learned about painting that is severely lacking in digital representation, loading, pigment properties, and body strokes.

    I have touched on being able to load a brush manually already for multicolor loads or for changing the loading on a per stroke basis outside of using a slider, but it also changes the way the paint comes off of the brush. There are several ways to load a brush, each affecting the shape of the paint on the bristles and the resulting stroke. This is in part why painting with natural media feels so different than digital, and also one of the major appeals to working with natural media, the sheer control and speed. Most any affect can be attained through other methods but really getting that range without having to stop to really consider setting in a non analog fashion can really take one out of the painting flow. This is similar to having to layout more paint on the palette after having been painting for awhile, and thus losing focus on the painting itself (an admittedly true drawback to painting with natural media).

    Pigment properties is the next major difference that I have noticed, certain pigments themselves are actually transparent, and they mix very different than more opaque pigments. Much of this is in the way the pigment particles are actually structured with more opaque ones having larger particles than the more transparent pigments. This is a good example of why separating the paint properties from the brush is so important, being able to control how it is going to react is important, viscosity, rheological characteristics, opacity, and so forth. I have recently learned how to make nearly clear putties that can be added to paint to increase transparency of paints but not affect the handling or viscosity nearly as much. These are all effects that can be attained but sometimes we cannot do multiples of these at the same time, so the workarounds end up taking far too long for a result that is never quite as expected.

    Lastly is being able to utilize the tilt sensitivity of the oil brush to detect how much paint is coming off of a brush. This is important, as if one loads the side of a brush and adjusts the tilt ratio of the brush to surface they can achieve varying amounts of impasto strokes on the same stroke.

    Basically I want to be able to control more features of the digital brushes to increase workflow speed while being able to achieve the same results from digital to natural media. The restrictions here are already less so than most other software, with much better representation currently than I can find in any other software, but it could still be far better as well. Ultimately, being able to control these variables in a very intuitive and analog fashion will always be far more effective than the digital controls such as sliders and numbers.

    Extra thought, I have noticed that when I make an impasto stroke and go over it with an instant dry oil brush it actually covers as though the impasto texture isn't there, meaning that those ridges are not affecting the pull of the stroke on top. This makes achieving certain effects much more difficult (or nearly impossible).

  5. #15
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    Jun 2013
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    If I'm understanding you correctly (and there's a lot to take in here) some of these features are already available in Paintstorm Studio - dirty brush, hairy brush, brushstroke extender etc. Have you tried it? AR has by far the most intuitive, carefully designed GUI and most 'lifelike' painting experience of any digital painting package but no single package can do all things! It's possible to flip between PS and AR as both offer .psd compatibility whilst retaining layers.
    Last edited by Liquid Len; 10-25-2015 at 12:11 PM.

  6. #16
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    Whoops, I missed that comment by LiquidLen there, in response to that though. There is no reason why a single package can't do everything, the capability to switch between a more painting software and a more digital editing software could easily exist. Much of the code used in Paintstorm Studio and Krita is open source and easily available for integration within the current builds of AR, just with regards to only editing the pixel information and disregarding depth and paint volumes. AR actually already contains many pixel only modifiers, such as the sticker spray. What we are lacking is stuff that tends to clutter up the User Interface. . . which brings me to the desire for a completely customizable User Interface.

    In fact, a UI Editor mode might be very useful, with both advanced and simplified presets. In advanced mode placement, keyboard shortcuts and so on could be assigned to everything (currently there is no way to assign shortcuts or modifier toggles to MANY things), settings for toggles for certain tools being different than other tools (shift click drag = size for pencil, but hardness for airbrush, etc, individual to specific presets even!), moving much of the UI to other monitors, removing/adding menu flyouts and drop downs (for more customization), and colorizing the UI so it's not all white and grays to make certain this easier to see sometimes (or light up when a modifier is held, also able to be rekeybound). In simple mode, it's just placement, size, and color.

    The idea is that the software has unlimited potential, but needs to be adaptive enough for the individual user.

    Also, we need a way either make macros or actions that perform several small tasks in succession. As an example, I often add noise, posterize, and set blend mode to overlay for various imported images for textures, then adjust the opacity, finally erasing out some content from the texture resource. This kind of repetitive actions takes a long time right now, or a lot longer than automating half of that and then manually adjusting opacity and erasing. These kinds of operations are the main reason I even bother with other software at all, anytime I'm just purely creating from imagination or just looking at reference I will just use ArtRage, but there are times where clients want to see what something would look like with MANY different textures and right now that can get cumbersome and time consuming to do with AR. (macros/actions made should be able to be assigned a keybinding or a way to open a panel that then activates all those keybindings but only while it's open).

    We could have everything in one program, the problem most times is that the UI becomes too cumbersome, solve it with this, and let the users build the best UI for various different tasks (with intuitive shortcuts made by individuals), then we can share these via the packages export (exporting our UI and macros, actions).

  7. #17
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    Did I already mention a duplicate merge flattened layer (ctrl+shift+alt+e in photoshop)? This is something that I often miss, but it's not really such a big deal, but it lead me to having to make groups earlier on in my work so I could copy the group and merge the contents to achieve the same thing. Grouping is actually a bit clunky as well, I can't select multiple layers at once and drag them around, nothing terribly breaking, but more repetitive motions that I'd love to avoid (dragging layers one at a time versus shift click to select a whole bunch and drop them all into a group at one time.

  8. #18
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    Quote Originally Posted by Delofasht View Post
    Did I already mention a duplicate merge flattened layer (ctrl+shift+alt+e in photoshop)? This is something that I often miss, but it's not really such a big deal, but it lead me to having to make groups earlier on in my work so I could copy the group and merge the contents to achieve the same thing. Grouping is actually a bit clunky as well, I can't select multiple layers at once and drag them around, nothing terribly breaking, but more repetitive motions that I'd love to avoid (dragging layers one at a time versus shift click to select a whole bunch and drop them all into a group at one time.
    We are definitely looking at this stuff (I know, because I've gone and whined at the programmers about it myself), but there's some complicated back end issues that they have to figure out a new and magical coding solution for (or something, that's my interpretation of getting stuff thrown at me, anyway). So it's a thing they're looking at, but may not actually happen.

  9. #19
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    Quote Originally Posted by HannahRage View Post
    We are definitely looking at this stuff (I know, because I've gone and whined at the programmers about it myself), but there's some complicated back end issues that they have to figure out a new and magical coding solution for (or something, that's my interpretation of getting stuff thrown at me, anyway). So it's a thing they're looking at, but may not actually happen.
    A lot of these complex tasks may be achievable with an actions (macros) kind of approach, but giving us a more up to date plugins resource may solve some of the issues as well. Being able to grab any of the 64 bit plugins available to other software packages would go a long way towards removing the need to program all of it yourselves.

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