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From: pfinch@best.com (Phillip Finch)
To: Multiple recipients of list <lightwave@garcia.com>
Subject: Paint programs; was Re: bouncing mail--try again
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Louis Volpe wrote:
>And Dpaint and Pshop are totally different - But no need to trash Pshop is
>any kind of cross platform flame -
>
>I have Pshop on my mac, my pc, AND on my Amiga (AMAX4 board) -
>
>what blows away EVERYTHING is the filters or plugins - they are too
>wonderful and when one has used them you just can't go back -
>
>I bought my first real mac BECAUSE of these filters - even the public domain
>ones are great - "XTextures" and "Sucking Fish" for example.
Maybe I ought to throw in a good word here for Fractal Design Painter. I
can't compare it to DPaint or to Animator Pro, neither of which I have used.
But compared to Photoshop, Painter is a much more useful tool for animators.
For starters, it willl apply those Photoshop filters, in batches. (One
exception: Painter won't run the Cybermesh heightfield export plugin).
Photoshop may have slightly superior abilities in the areas of print
production and color control, and its surface lighting effects aren't quite
as sophisticated as Photoshop's; otherwise, I can't think of anything
Photoshop does that Painter won't. But Painter has far more abilities than
Photoshop for creating natural, organic-looking images. And it will do it
all in batches.
It imports .avi or framestacks in virtually any format, including TIFF. You
can record the operations performed to a single frame, creating an automatic
script that can be edited and applied to any number of frames within the
stack. Among other operations, you can automate color selection and mask
creation, which means that it is at least a basic tool for animation
compositing.
I would guess that you could achieve a reasonable "film grain" look--or
even match grain--using the texture controls. Adobe's Gallery Effects series
has a flexible plugin that would probably do the job with a little
trial-and-error tweaking.
Just like Photoshop, Painter will knock out image maps with ease. It also
has a neat "edge painting" feature that will wrap-around brushstrokes from
side to side and top/bottom. Very nice for creating seamless textures.
One caveat: I hate the damn interface, which apparently was designed to
appeal to traditional paint-and-canvas artists. It's probably a
right-brain-left-brain thing, but to me it just seems very disorganized and
"scattered". If it was set up like Photoshop, I would probably use it 95 per
cent of the time for my image-manipulation work. For creating great,
natural-looking CG images from scratch, however, it more than justifies my
mental grinding of gears.
I'm certainly not pushing Painter as an all-purpose tool for doing 2-D
animation. But if you accept the proposition that every animator ought to
have a good image creation/manipulation program on his hard drive, Painter
