New feature in CS5 could have been in Xara 5

[sgiff]

So I posted this feature (Paint Inside) a couple of years back in this forum. No one seemed to think it that great especially Xara but apparently Adobe thought it was because now it's in CS5. The only difference in my version is that you would paint with a bitmap brush i.e. a simple airbrush type brush to create nice auto clipped shaded areas. I'm sorry to see that Adobe get's the claim for being innovative in this feature when it should have been Xara when X5 came out. Sure you can go through the painstaking process of a workaround but this is a workflow issue that would greatly speed up shading of vector objects and quite honestly this has always been the bottleneck of vector art. There have been many different attempts at enhancing vector shading like adobe mesh tool but really so far all of these are slow and cumbersome to use. I don't specifically like the vector brush implementation that Adobe has because you really can't get a nice smooth shade easily with a vector brush as you can with a bitmap brush.

http://www.adobe.com/products/creati...ID=0&npObjID=2

s.g.

[angelize]

This is easy to do in Xtreme. In my example below I created a quick brush by drawing an ellipse and giving it a light colour then cloned it an gave the clone a darker colour. Next I gave the clone a bitmap transparency to give the brush a little texture. Then I grouped both ellipses and gave the group a circular transparency, setting the starting transparency at around 40%. Next I made a bitmap copy and made some duplicates of the bitmap in varying sizes and even squashed one. I selected all the bitmaps and made my brush the one important thing to remember is that Xtreme will as a default tile your brush so go to the fill properties tab of the edit brush dialogue and clear the check mark from tile fills. Once you have finished adjusting your brush settings ie: spacing etc. just paint on your shading and hit Q on your keyboard to clip it when you are done.

[handrawn]

then you hit the problem you always hit with xtreme brushes - changing the color before you use it

plus the problems you can get when resizing the line

no problems in illustrator CS4 either way and therefore I would imagine not in CS5

.....

[sgiff]

Yes, I knew someone would post the "but it's easy to do in Xara" and yet look how many steps it took to do that. That is exactly why I said this is a workflow enhancement. There are always workarounds for most things but ease of use and intuitive workflow is what designers that have deadlines look for. Hence I am not looking for responses to workarounds as I'm sure there are many. The point was that this feature is much simpler and faster to achieve. Actually there are not many, look how uneven your attempt at shading turned out in this example. I know that yes you could have done a better job if you had put more time into it but even so. With an airbrush tool that was bitmap based and a tablet. One swipe and you would have been done. That's a half second to do where as your explanation took a minute or more.

[Giovanni]

Often many little things make a big difference at the end of the day.
Actually appereance panel and brushes sold me to Illustrator: the time saved with those tools make Illustrator as fast as Xara albeit being slower at screen rendering.

[zaphodeist]

A program has something a Xara program doesn't have. Got it. Brushes need renovation, agreed. Frances was showing how to do something in Xtreme and is consistently helpful on here. No need to be so dismissive sgiff. If your thread is not asking for suggestions how to do this in Xara Xtreme and is just about what AI has shouldn't it be an Off Topic thread, especially as you knew somebody would post something helpful here?

[handrawn]

Hi John

Trouble is - for those of us that draw with brushes [as you would with a real brush or pen or pencil ] xtreme brushes are unworkable - but they were never designed for this, fair enough as far as it goes

I have Illustrator/Photoshop CS4

Quite a while back a member here told me off for moaning about brushes and said I should go forth and use the right program

Well I have, and now only 40 % of my coloring is done in xtreme as a result, because it is not worth chopping and changing for the small stuff.

The more I get into CS4 the more I find it is well fast enough - not talking here about 'this operation is faster than that' - I am talking about looking at the whole project from start to finish...

In xtreme I love the soft groups, because I still 'paste up' comic pages in xtreme and soft groups makes that a lot easier - but pasting up comic pages is not the major part of my work...


@FRANCES [angelize] If I was one who appeared dismissive I am sorry - but it was not of you, who as John says are most helpful

Its just that the program and I have diverged these last 2 years; I still enthuse the things I love about it, but....

[zaphodeist]

Hi Steve. It wasn't you who I thought was being dismissive I can see the problems with brushes right enough [especially for artists like yourself] - rarely experimented with them as a result - and I think you should moan more often ... they'll take notice of you one day with a bit of luck No, it's the point and positioning of this thread I can't fathom. Feature could have been in Xtreme ... but it isn't ... errrmm ...

[handrawn]

yep agree - well I, for one, have given up both the bitching and the requesting too

I can do the comics in inkscape and xtreme, and [most of] the other stuff in CS4 [maybe 5 we shall see ]

xtreme is going to make a damn fine web oriented program I think, and believe personally that this was always the intention - its a great market to be in

I understand full well what John [covoxer] said elsewhere: xtreme cannot compete with Adobe Illustrator, it has to do its own thing

[zaphodeist]

Exactly! Xtreme is Xtreme, AI is AI.