[Old_Ravok]

I am (somewhat) new to graphical design/art. Frankly, I am going to scour your forums here and pick your brains. But I need to know what tools are good for me to purchase. I am not planning on going professional, or anything of that sort - I am just looking to draw some interesting pictures using a computer.

I don't want to twist photos all to heck, nor do I want to morf and hack someone else's work unless its necessary and I can give good credit.

What is a good computer program to suit my needs? I hear you folks talk about Maya, and I know there are some real good ones out there. What is a decent choice for a beginner?

I currently have Macromedia Dreamworks Studio 4 - which is basically net-design, and not really what I want. The 3-D Game studio wire-frame programs I picked up are fun, but they deal mostly with tilesets. I am hoping for a program that I can really sink my creative teeth into and draw something like VRGN #2 by Dhabih.

I was quite impressed with the work done in Spawn, and it looks like her cape design was inspired by it. I would like to do a Paladin-type with a cape battle-torn like that.

Hopefully I can post you folks my first stuff once I settle in and really draw. Or heck, I will send you my scribbling so you can see what I am working on.

Greetings to you,

Rav
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I am a Newbie at creating computer graphics. Fan-boy rating = 6 due to star-crossed pixelation

[Impaler]

Maya, 3D Studio Max and Lightwave are all 3D programs, by which I mean that you "sculpt" and construct objects in a 3D space. You then "render" the scene, a complex calculative process, into a 2D image. It's a very technical art.

The vast majority of the art you see on this board is done in a 2D program. Photoshop, Painter, Photopaint, Illustrator, and Paint Shop Pro are all 2D programs. They all basically work like Microsoft Paint, in that you paint with color with a digital paintbrush. The notable exception is Illustrator, which does not use pixels to define an image (a concept known as raster art). Instead of using pixels, it uses very complex geometry to define shapes. This is known as vector art, and it has a distinct look when compared to raster art.

The programs that almost everyone here use are either Painter, or Photoshop. Painter is a natural media simulator. The oils in Painter behave almost exactly like oils in real life, and you have 30-someodd other types of media with which to experiment. Photoshop is a very powerful image editing program, which also makes it one of the most famous. It's used all around the internet for entirely different things, from illustration to photo manipulation to avant-garde photography to graphic design work. Starting with version 7.0, they've included a pretty bang-up paint engine, almost rivaling Painter in media simulation.

None of these programs come cheap, however. Painter 8 retails for around $300. Photoshop CS comes at hefty price of $700. Illustrator is something like $300. 3D programs are prohibitively expensive; a single license for Maya or 3D Studio Max will cost upwards of $2,000. If you're serious about illustration, you'll also want a Tablet. Wacom's the best, but the smallest tablet will cost you at least $100 (unless you buy ebay), and the more likely cost is something like $350.

There are some options, however. Each of those programs above offer at least a 30-day trial period, where you can muck around in a full-featured version for free. I think Maya might even still have the "Personal Learning Edition", which is a fully operational, fully featured version of Maya that you can download for free. The only catch is that it watermarks all of your rendered images with "MAYA PERSONAL LEARNING EDITION". Paint Shop Pro is a capable image editor that retails for around $100. I don't know how good the brush engine is, but it's got to be at least as powerful as Photoshop 5.5, which many people used in the past to create some bang-up images.

Last, but not least, there's Art Rage, a natural media simulator with some powerful tools that almost match Painter's in a few, limited aspects. It retails for FREE, and if you play around with this program for a few weeks, you'll get a good feel for how painting works with the others. If you hate it, then hey. You didn't blow 300 bucks on Painter.

A last few appendices:

#1. If you're lucky enough to be a college student, (or even if you know one) you can pick up all of this software at a dramatically reduced price. Painter 8 retails for as low as $75. You can get the Adobe Creative Studio (Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign) for around $300 instead of $1000. If you're about to be a college student, then wait for a year until you make any purchases. The savings are worth the wait.

#2. ArtRage has been updated from version 1.0 to 1.1! A list of the new features:

• Create Larger Canvases: 1.1 allows you to create canvases larger than the screen.
  
• Zoom: Because you can create larger canvases, you can also zoom in/out of your painting, and move it around on the screen.
  
• Colour Sampler: You can now sample colours from your canvas rather than having to use the colour picker.
  
• Import Images: You can now import an image in to ArtRage. This creates a new canvas and fills it with the image you imported. That image can then be smeared or painted in to as if it had been created using the Oil Brush.
  
• Pressure Adjustment: You can adjust the basic pressure value used by the application, to tweak it up or down depending on your tablet. If you use a mouse, this can adjust the look of your strokes as if you were using a tablet.
  
• Windowed Mode: ArtRage can be collapsed to a smaller window. When in full screen mode, it now has the option to hide the taskbar.

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QED, sort of.