[SketchBook]

Greetings all,

I'm on the Alias SketchBook Pro product team and I've been reading your posts here with great interest. If you haven't tried our trial version (we now have a full feature trial) I would encourage you to download it. If you have tried it, I would love to get your feedback on the good and bad aspects of the software. We are trying to create a one-of-a-kind artist product for tablet PCs and Wacom tabelts and we can't do that without input from people like you.

Cheers.
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Colin Smith
Alias|Wavefront

[B0b]

URL

[SketchBook]

Good point...

http://www.aliaswavefront.com/en/support/sketchbook/downloads/index.jhtml

Cheers
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Colin Smith
Alias|Wavefront

[balistic]

My first impression is that it seems fairly shallow for the price you're asking. There doesn't appear to be any kind of brush/paper texturing, and the lack of depth in terms of brush customization is somewhat disappointing. Digital artists are accustomed to being able to load their own brush nibs and paper textures, and to otherwise refine their own tools. I don't mind the interface widget, though I wish it were an achromatic gray instead of blue.

I will give you credit for the tablet interpolation. Quick strokes appear smooth, and the process of drawing feels very fluid. As a lightweight tool for quickly hashing out an idea, I'd use it, but not if I had to pay more than $30.

Some feature suggestions:

- The default canvas is white, and there doesn't appear to be a fill tool a user can access to quickly change that. I know Alias has invested plenty of research into algorithmic texturing . . . how about including an algorithmic paper texture generator that an artist can use to configure the color, texture, and visible fiber content of the paper he's using? Even just a few preset papers of different hues and shades would be an improvement over always starting from bleached white.

- Wet media simulation. Markers that smear, watercolors that blend, et cetera.

- Collaborative network drawing (whiteboard). A feature like this would fit in with the corporate/designer demographic the product seems to be aimed at.


As someone who owns Painter and Photopaint, I can't think of any reason I'd want to use Sketch, aside from the nice tablet interpolation (and I think Painter comes close to matching that). Granted, it has a much-smaller hard disc footprint that either of those apps, but even tablet PCs are shipping with at least a dozen gigs of space.

Anyhow, that's my take. Maybe some of those features are in there and I've just missed them.
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brian.prince|light.comp.paint

[B0b]

[SketchBook]

Bob - I noticed that afterwards.. oh well
Let me know what you think when you've had a chance to play with it.

Balistic - Thanks for the note, I think you will find some of your points will be taken care of in V2. However, there are some good ideas there that I will pass on to the design team. $30?? Sheesh, we have families to support

Cheers
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Colin Smith
Alias|Wavefront

[Frog]

$30 for an AliaslWavefront product? Hahahaha.

Am downloading it now and will report back.
_________________
www.itchy-animation.co.uk
www.itchy-illustration.co.uk
<A HREF="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</A>

[balistic]

[Frog]

I liked it very much

Main gripe, and a serious one: multi-monitor support in Win2000 is poor, with my second monitor on, the cursor and the stroke do not appear in the same place!!! The stroke is a few inches to the left of where my cursor is. As soon as I disable the second monitor everything is fine.

Main plus: The best tablet response of any program I have ever tried - superb. You can draw fast, you can draw slow. No jaggies, no shakey lines, just like drawing on paper. Better than both Photoshop and Painter in this respect, Illustrator comes close but this is still nicer.

A few more points:

There doesn't appear to be any keyboard shortcuts, this is bad. You should have at the very least shortuts for changing brush sizes, opacity and for zooming and panning. If these follow the Adobe standards then all the better, no need to make us learn new keys is there?

I understand the interface philosophy by the way, but some things are just better with shortcuts.

The tool selection is great, and personally I don't mind the lack of paper textures. This feels just like drawing with markers and pencils, and that's good. The smear tool however I don't like, it doesn't really smear, it just reminds me of KPT Goo, except not even as good as that.

It's fast, and that's great too, it feels very responsive and that makes it nice to use.

Great job, and do I get a discount for testing it?
_________________
www.itchy-animation.co.uk
www.itchy-illustration.co.uk
<A HREF="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</A>

[merlyns]

I downloaded it now.

as frog sad its really good for a tabled and sketching.

but where are the opacity sliders and thickness sliders.

very nice program, but it still needs a network drawing futere

-david
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[SketchBook]

Merlyns et all,

In case it wasn't obvious - if you go the tool editor (stroke down on the toolbox icon) if you pick any of the tools there and click on "copy to custom" you can adjust the proporties of any brush and save it. This includes the size due to pressure, oppacity due to pressure, stamping, slant and roundess. Additionally, you can change the opacity of each layer in the layer editor.

Thanks again for your feedback!
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Colin Smith
Alias|Wavefront

[Frog]

[merlyns]

thanks didn't knew that.

-david
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[SketchBook]

Frog - because the software was created for the Tablet PC - we didn't put in a lot of shortcut keys - that will be fixed in V2.

Cheers
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Colin Smith
Alias|Wavefront

[Frog]

What about my other points? Since I gave quite detailed feedback it would be nice to have a response...
_________________
www.itchy-animation.co.uk
www.itchy-illustration.co.uk
<A HREF="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</A>

[spooge demon]

Colin was generous enough to send me a motion computing tablet so I could try out SB pro. I told him I would take it to life session and try to do some pics, and these were the first attempts. Once I get sketchbook pro onto a machine that will run it with a wacom I will try to do something... better.

I agree with all the above comments, I really do like drawing with it, there is a lot of potential there, if that is how you work. I am more of a shape person, so I may miss out on this capability.

I suppose expecting that great interface design will overcome the thousands of hours spent with photoshop is a little naive on my part. I will have to spend some time with it.

a few things made me tear my hair out.

1) no quick eyedropper access. I had to go target a button everytime. I never knew how much I would miss my keyboard hand.

2) I could customize the brushes OK, but how to identify them by only a generic icon? Photoshop and painter have a little of the same problem, but the previews help out a lot. Also, once again, I know my palette there.

3) Smudge tool does not behave as expected.

4)no texture possible. But you build up samll flats enough, it starts to feel like it. That's what texture is anyway.

I know you are not trying to compete with dedicated painting programs, so maybe it is fine the way it is.

But everyone try it out! I think it will evolve into something great. My wish, Colin, is that your team take over painter. I think AW has the time and resources and perserverance to put a lot of smart engineers on a problem until it is solved. Example, what you are doing here by asking us jungle natives what makes a better spear.

[Dr. Bang]

[B0b]

ROFL

[SketchBook]

Hey all, just got back from NAB in Las Vegas where we were showing SketchBook at the Wacom booth - Love those Cintiq machines

Just wanted to thank you all again for your feedback and a special thanks to Frog and Spooge. I'm passing along your feedback to the development team - i wouldn't be surprised if one of the engineers would want more detail from you as to how the smudge too should work - I will leave that up to them. I'm glad that Dr. Bang was able to find happiness with our product - even if that wasn't the original intension

Talk to you soon..

Colin
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Colin Smith
Alias|Wavefront

[DarkVVulf]

Just wanted to echo the praise to the pressure sensitivity on this program.

This is a program I would use only as a step, perhaps to start out a sketch or to refine a scanned sketch. Not to replace Photoshop or Painter. Which seems about right, it is called Sketchbook afterall.
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den.vvulf

[aquamire]

Talk about coincidence!

I gave Sketchbook pro a try the other day just from hearing about it in Computer Graphics magazine..

As everyone else said, great tablet support.

I agree with all the other points as well.

One small cry from a relatively voiceless individual however, as someone else mentioned, whiteboard support would be amazing. Quality whiteboard apps are just lacking, and the NetPainter feature of Painter7 is rather undocumented and well hidden. A lot of artists are doing co-op works these days, and sometimes sketching something out in realtime to someone just works better than words.
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-Aquamire
"Thursdays, I could never get the hang of Thursdays." - Arthur Dent

[Lunatique]

I gave it a test drive, and here are some rants and raves:

Rants:

Drawing with an Crosshair icon, where the contact point is the middle of the icon is a VERY intrusive thing. Really needs to implement a brush/triangle thing like Photoshop or Painter so that you can at least see 3 corners out of the 4 that surrounds the contact point.

The smudge/blend tool is more like a push/pull thing. Not at all the same thing.

No layer options like multiply, screen, gel...etc. That's so helpful for keeping a line drawing while coloring/painting with any tool and not disturb the lines.

Eyedropper button only sucks. Must implement hotkey.

There are a lot of other issues, but these were the most glaring.

Raves:

The maya style hotbox is pretty cool. Frees up space onscreen. It's also great that you can keep the tool menus on screen for people that don't want to use it.

Responsiveness for the drawing tools were excellent, but larger brushes still lags.

I agree with Spooge that competing with Photoshop or Painter will have to mean you have equivalent toolset/features. I recently tested out Deep Paint 2D for Right Hemisphere and that's what I told them too. It looks like you guys are going for a very light version of Painter--specifically designed for concept sketches for product visualization/presentation. My suggestion is to implement the basic image editing tools that all photoshop-like/image browsing programs have, and beef up the layers options and some better brushes that behaves more like Painter brushes.

I guess what I'm saying is: make it like a combo of streamlined Photoshop and Painter, but without all the useless crap designed for weekend hobbyists(like the image hose, artistic cloner/filters..etc). I can't tell you how MUCH the enitre digital art community wishes for a software like that. If something like that came along, I can guarantee you that it would steal a hefty chunk of profit from Adobe and Corel.