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Post by jeffgeorge on Sept 11, 2017 3:48:38 GMT -9
You really should consider getting an entry-level graphics tablet. I've been using the same entry-level $60 Wacom tablet for years now, and it's made a huge difference to my papercraft hobby, as well as my real work, which often involves retouching photos. I really should step up to a better tablet, but there's always something more pressing--or fun--to do with the $200 that the next ones up seem to cost. I have to ask - why do I need a graphics tablet? I am completely blank on this, have never used one, read that I absolutely needed one to do any graphics work on the computer, and also read that I should learn to draw properly first, then switch later if at all. To go a little deeper, my current process is to draw domething with pencil on paper, use a lightbox to keep what I want and change what needs changing till I have something that I like, then I use the lightbox again to create different layers (for overlays, fur etc). Then I scan all that, vectorize, add color etc. What can a tablet do for me there? Thanks in advance! Frankly, nothing, if your workflow is entirely analog, and you're scanning everything in at the end. If you wanted to move most or all of those steps onto the computer, and handle them digitally, on the other hand, a graphics tablet would be a great convenience. But that's all it is, really--a great convenience. It's not a necessity, but once you use one for a few hours, you start to wonder how you ever got anything done without one. Basically, a graphics tablet lets you draw on a computer with the same kind of control and the same ergonomics as the pencil you're using to draw all those layers on your lightbox. It does two important things that make drawing on the computer screen (nearly) the same as drawing on paper. First, it fits in your hand like a pencil, instead of like a big rock, the way a mouse does. You can control the point of the tablet stylus with the same precision that you can a traditional pencil, whereas that sort of precision is impossible with a mouse. Second, a graphics tablet is pressure sensitive. A mouse button has only two positions--100% off and 100% on--but even a cheap graphics tablet is pressure sensitive to better than 1/10th of 1% (the cheapest ones offer 1024 levels of sensitivity between 0% and 100%). If you draw with a pencil, you know that you control the darkness (opacity, technically) and thickness of your line by how hard you press; a graphics tablet brings that same functionality to drawing on a computer. For people who are doing the kind of work we used to do with technical pens--drafting, mostly--a graphics tablet is less of a big deal. In analog drafting, your line opacity is always 100%, and you pre-determine your line thickness when you select which pen you're going to use to draw this line. If the next line is thicker or thinner, you switch pens. These are things you can do with a mouse--on/off opacity, and pre-set line thickness. My sister--a theatrical designer who does a lot of CAD work on her computer--doesn't use a graphics tablet. Since she still does her renderings on paper with watercolors, she has no need for a digital drawing tool that simulates a pencil or paintbrush. (But if she makes a mistake on a watercolor rendering, or wants to change a color, she can't just Undo it--she often has to redraw and repaint the rendering from scratch, since she's not working digitially, using Photoshop, Krita, or GIMP.) The first fifteen minutes you spend with a graphics tablet feels weird. You have to learn to connect the point of the stylus on the screen with the movement of your hand on the tablet in your brain, since you can't see the stylus and the image at the same time. But it's no harder than when you first learned to use a mouse to drag and drop--it's just a skill you have to practice for a few minutes. But if you commit to using a graphics tablet for one simple project involving sketching or painting, and spend two or three hours getting used to it, you'll never go back to trying to draw with a mouse. Of course, my argument is irrelevant if you are committed to doing your sketching and painting on paper with traditional tools. The decision to shift from traditional media to digital is a different one, based on the ability to save, clone, copy, scale, and infinitely reproduce a digital image. But if you do make the decision to switch to sketching and painting digitally, you need a graphics tablet to give your digital medium the same level of control flexibility that you expect from pencil, paint, and paper.
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Post by Dominic on Sept 12, 2017 1:47:42 GMT -9
jeffgeorge thanks for that in-depth explanation! I am not sure yet whether I want to stay analog or go digital. I think skill-building would not hurt, but I have no idea how much that I can do (semi-decently) with a pencil I could do easier with a tablet - like adding a fur layer. I might have to give it a try - the itch is definietly there - but only after I got back in the game the old-school way if only to prove to me that I will. Thanks again!
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Post by jeffgeorge on Sept 12, 2017 9:22:15 GMT -9
jeffgeorge thanks for that in-depth explanation! I am not sure yet whether I want to stay analog or go digital. I think skill-building would not hurt, but I have no idea how much that I can do (semi-decently) with a pencil I could do easier with a tablet - like adding a fur layer. I might have to give it a try - the itch is definietly there - but only after I got back in the game the old-school way if only to prove to me that I will. Thanks again! If you're not sure how important making minis, or whatever, is to you, definitely do a few projects to see how you feel about it before you spend a bunch of money. The main advantages to working digitally over analog, as I see them, are: - Undo
- Multi-step Undo (Yeah, I'm counting the same one twice, but adding multi-step capability is a HUGE advantage)
- Saving multiple versions of the image
- Color controls (Levels, curves, Hue-Saturation-Lightness)
- Layers that can be reordered
- Layer masks
- Scaling
- Stretching, flipping, rotating
- Aligning (important for front-to-back registration, as well as formatting several minis on a page for easier printing and assembly)
None of those things can be easily done with pencil/paint/paper, though as you've found, you can move from analog to digital partway through the workflow to take advantage of features like scaling, flipping, and aligning as you prepare your minis for output and assembly. Basically, going digital makes your work safer (against errors or damage) and more efficient (once you get used to the tools, at least). But it's not absolutely essential, except for the last few steps in which you prepare the minis for distribution and printing.
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Post by Dominic on Sept 12, 2017 22:07:21 GMT -9
jeffgeorge thanks for that in-depth explanation! I am not sure yet whether I want to stay analog or go digital. I think skill-building would not hurt, but I have no idea how much that I can do (semi-decently) with a pencil I could do easier with a tablet - like adding a fur layer. I might have to give it a try - the itch is definietly there - but only after I got back in the game the old-school way if only to prove to me that I will. Thanks again! If you're not sure how important making minis, or whatever, is to you, definitely do a few projects to see how you feel about it before you spend a bunch of money. The main advantages to working digitally over analog, as I see them, are: - Undo
- Multi-step Undo (Yeah, I'm counting the same one twice, but adding multi-step capability is a HUGE advantage)
- Saving multiple versions of the image
- Color controls (Levels, curves, Hue-Saturation-Lightness)
- Layers that can be reordered
- Layer masks
- Scaling
- Stretching, flipping, rotating
- Aligning (important for front-to-back registration, as well as formatting several minis on a page for easier printing and assembly)
None of those things can be easily done with pencil/paint/paper, though as you've found, you can move from analog to digital partway through the workflow to take advantage of features like scaling, flipping, and aligning as you prepare your minis for output and assembly. Basically, going digital makes your work safer (against errors or damage) and more efficient (once you get used to the tools, at least). But it's not absolutely essential, except for the last few steps in which you prepare the minis for distribution and printing.
I do feel that miniatures could be important if they to not take ages to complete. But I have also made the experience that trying to get a vector to look right in Inkscape can be way more time consuming than giving it another try on paper - possibly even just doing ot over the first one and then copy the "right" one later to a new version. I guess that would also be true for a tablet. I will definitely do anything after sketching in Inkscape.
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Post by jeffgeorge on Sept 13, 2017 8:08:22 GMT -9
I do feel that miniatures could be important if they to not take ages to complete. But I have also made the experience that trying to get a vector to look right in Inkscape can be way more time consuming than giving it another try on paper - possibly even just doing ot over the first one and then copy the "right" one later to a new version. I guess that would also be true for a tablet. I will definitely do anything after sketching in Inkscape. I haven't used Inkscape much, but my sense is that its the wrong tool for sketching. As a vector-based application, it really doesn't lend itself to free-hand, fluid movements of the drawing tools--it's better suited to very regular, regimented drafting tasks. Inkscape is not a substitute for Photoshop, it's a substitute for Adobe Illustrator, and Photoshop and Illustrator are very different applications that work in very different ways. It's much more valid to compare Inkscape to technical pens, straight edges, and T-squares and triangles, than to compare it to pencils, paints, and brushes. Like Photoshop, GIMP handles its images as bit-maps, which has advantages and disadvantages. On the down side, bit-maps almost by definition less efficient in terms of file-size than vector images, and they can't be scaled without compromising image quality. (You can scale them down without much problem, but doing so sacrifices data that you can't get back if you later have to scale back up.) But the tools that you use in a bit-map paint program are much more analogous to traditional sketching and painting tools, like pencils, charcoal, paints and brushes. If you're working in a bit-mapped application, like Photoshop or GIMP, you're going to feel a big improvement in feel and control with a graphics tablet, because it makes the physical tool in your hand--the stylus--work more like the traditional tool--a pencil or brush--that it's replacing. If you're working in a vector-based program like Inkscape or Illustrator, a graphics tablet might not make much difference at all. In fairness, GIMP is an open-source project, built by self-selected software engineers without benefit a marketing department or UX team, so it's an artist's tool with a user experience designed by engineers. The interface is highly technical and clunky, and a lot of the incredibly useful features and filters that are built into Photoshop are either not there in GIMP, or have to be done "from the ground up". A very simple example of this is drop-shadows; in Photoshop, there is a ready-made Drop Shadow feature built into the menus (I've forgotten where at this point, but if I opened up Photoshop, I'm sure I could find it in less than 30 seconds). To make a drop shadow in GIMP, you have to go through all the steps by hand (select the layer or object you want to put a shadow behind, add a layer beneath it, grow the selection size a few pixels, feather the selection, fill the selection on the new layer with black or dark gray, and reposition the new layer with the shadow appropriately). I've never found something I could do in Photoshop (I used an old version until Windows 10 made my version unusable) that I couldn't eventually do in GIMP, but in GIMP nothing is automatic--you have to figure out how to do it step-by-step. (Remember, Google and YouTube are your friends.) I also need to try out Krita, an open-source paint program that seems less feature-rich and flexible than GIMP, but more closely attuned to the natural workflow and techniques of artists in physical media. The ability to freely rotate the image while you draw without resampling the pixels sounds HUGE. (With GIMP, if you rotate the image at all, it re-figures all the pixels, which results in loss of image quality at any rotation other than 90, 180 or 270 degrees, so you just don't rotate except in 90-degree chunks.) Bottom line, if Inkscape or Illustrator is your main tool, a graphics tablet is probably not going to help much at all, but if you're using Photoshop, GIMP or Krita most of the time, switching from a mouse to a graphics tablet is like switching from a Toyota Sienna minivan to a Porsche 911 Turbo. (I'm not a car guy, so my metaphor may not be ideal, but you get the idea...)
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Post by alloydog on Sept 13, 2017 9:41:57 GMT -9
Dominic I would seriously recommend getting a drawing tablet, even a secondhand one. My daughter was really good when she just had a mouse, but then we got her a small Wacom Intuos, it's about the size or a regular mouse mat. Now she can use the pressure effect as well as other bonuses. Her work has always been bl**dy good, but she can get stuff much quicker, because she doesn't have to create effects like the way a brush stroke trails off towrds the end. My mate has one which is over 40 cm corner to corner and is also the screen! But that's a different story...
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Post by Dominic on Sept 13, 2017 11:42:07 GMT -9
jeffgeorge I see your point. I think my main reasoning for choosing Inkscape was the idea of being able to resize and rotate pieces to create variations of the same mini. It has never actually come that far (yet). But when I took a break from trying to make miniatures, I still worked with Inkscape for other stuff. In effect, I consider myself better at it than I am in Gimp (better only by comparison, of course). Of course, the question is whether rotating and recombining vector pieces would be a good idea, to begin with. I admit I am a little intimidated by the thought of actually coloring a miniature "by hand" instead of filling a space in a vectorized scan with a color, then use some kind of gradient to make it look dimensional... If I put it like that I think I should go with GIMP after all... alloydog What I take from that is that she was good before she started using the tablet - but to clarify, was she good using the mouse, or with a real pencil/brush? If the latter, I would think that I would need to get there first before switching. If she was good with the mouse and transferred that to the tablet, there might be hope for me...
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Post by alloydog on Sept 13, 2017 17:47:41 GMT -9
She is good with both digital and real-life media, that I admit, but what I was getting at, is that the drawing tablet helps helps cross-over from real world to digital. I gather you are more comfortable creating on paper, then transferring it to digital. Because a tablet can give the same effects you get with pens, pencils, brushes and so, plus you get two big benefits of digital media you don't really have in real life: layers and UNDO, you might find you can create more. But, it isn't for everyone, that is why I suggest finding a cheap secondhand one first.
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Post by Dominic on Sept 13, 2017 22:57:34 GMT -9
She is good with both digital and real-life media, that I admit, but what I was getting at, is that the drawing tablet helps helps cross-over from real world to digital. I gather you are more comfortable creating on paper, then transferring it to digital. Because a tablet can give the same effects you get with pens, pencils, brushes and so, plus you get two big benefits of digital media you don't really have in real life: layers and UNDO, you might find you can create more. But, it isn't for everyone, that is why I suggest finding a cheap secondhand one first. I am definitely considering it. I started making a new lightbox a few days ago, so I want to finish that and give the old-school approach a try, but I am beginning to see how a tablet could be beneficial in what I currently believe to be my workflow. Out of curiosity, what kind of art does she make? I find it hard to imagine what a professional can get out of a tablet, especiallly compared to old-school media.
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Post by alloydog on Sept 14, 2017 1:12:17 GMT -9
She does mostly sketches of people (made up, not real life), I'll ask her if she wouldn't mind if I put a link to some of her stuff online. m One other benefit of digital is the cost. Her tablet cost EUR 50. We've spent well over that on art suplies!
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Post by jeffgeorge on Sept 14, 2017 7:42:36 GMT -9
One other benefit of digital is the cost. Her tablet cost EUR 50. We've spent well over that on art suplies! Excellent point. The upfront cost on going digital may feel high, but consider all the pencils, pastels, charcoals, paints, canvases, bristol board, watercolor paper, etc. that you won't be buying any more!
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Post by alloydog on Sept 14, 2017 8:26:39 GMT -9
I find it hard to imagine what a professional can get out of a tablet, especiallly compared to old-school media. My mate Iain is a professional graphic artist/designer and all his work now is digital and done with his tablet - which going by the size of it, should be called a /table/ You can find some of his work here: 1000words.fi/en/My daughter, on the other hand, is doing it as a hobby. She's just uploaded a couplef pieces to Deviantart: deiakats.deviantart.com/
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Post by Dominic on Sept 14, 2017 11:51:29 GMT -9
I find it hard to imagine what a professional can get out of a tablet, especiallly compared to old-school media. My mate Iain is a professional graphic artist/designer and all his work now is digital and done with his tablet - which going by the size of it, should be called a /table/ You can find some of his work here: 1000words.fi/en/My daughter, on the other hand, is doing it as a hobby. She's just uploaded a couplef pieces to Deviantart: deiakats.deviantart.com/Looking good. I guess I am going to try the tablet route - maybe I can get my hands on a used one. Well, the cool art is one reason, my lightbox build failing (for now), so if I am going to invest a few bucks, I might as well invest into the future. Especially after filing through the countless pages for that one project I want to tackle from back when... Thanks for the help, guys!
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Post by grendelsmother64 on Sept 21, 2017 20:09:45 GMT -9
I found a second hand Bamboo for $20 (Canadian) on Kijiji (is that Canadian too...?). I needed a new pen for mine (the dog ate it...true story), the one advertised had 2 pens, and it was cheaper (and quicker) than buying a replacement pen from Wacom. So I got a pen for my old one...and my daughter stole the new one...good thing it had 2 pens. Oh...and don't buy a cheap knock-off tablet on Amazon. The reason my daughter stole the second Wacom/Bamboo was because her cheap knock-off only lasted 6 months (it was a HUION...definitely not recomended). My original Bamboo is going on 6 or 7 years now... GM64 Edit...the next month or so might be a good time to find a used one. Sometime around the end of October college kids start running out of money and the first thing to go are the toys they never use....
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Post by grendelsmother64 on Sept 22, 2017 17:49:50 GMT -9
As for programs...I mostly use inkscape for vector stuff, and lately I've been using a free paintshop-like program called Medibang. Medibang is very similar to Krita, but I tried Krita on 2 machines and it was kinda buggy on both...especially with my Wacom/Bamboo. I don't know why. Medibang seems to have most of the same stuff, but it runs way smoother. It does have an ad that pops up when you first open it, but only on opening. My old Corel-Draw suite had way more pop-ups...even though I'd already paid big bucks for it. Gimp has lots of features, and you can probably do more with it than Krita or Medibang, but it really is cumbersome to use...designed by programmers, not by users.... Anyway, I'd recommend trying Medibang as a free photoshop alternative. GM64
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Post by cowboyleland on Sept 22, 2017 18:18:06 GMT -9
GIMP. Resistance is useless. You will be assimilated. GIMP
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Post by jeffgeorge on Sept 22, 2017 22:24:55 GMT -9
GIMP. Resistance is useless. You will be assimilated. GIMP GIMP + YouTube. There are a lot of things Photoshop does with a single click that take 10 steps in GIMP (because Photoshop has pre-automated them as filters and tools, while GIMP does nothing automatically straight out of the box...). Need a drop shadow? Search YouTube. Need to make a stone texture? Search YouTube. That being said, I do use GIMP primarily, because I'm a cheapskate. But it does ask you to do a lot of things by hand that Photoshop does automatically.
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Post by alloydog on Sept 23, 2017 3:31:28 GMT -9
In GIMP, you can record a series of actions, so that next time they can be run with a single click. There are various methods, from using custom plug-ins to writting your own script, depending on your skills. This thread covers a few option: ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1055991
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Post by nullpointer on Sept 23, 2017 3:39:08 GMT -9
If you're a student, or you're unscrupulous and know a student, most schools offer discounted versions of many major software packages for educational use. My college bookstore offered Adobe bundles for ~80% off. In GIMP, you can record a series of actions, so that next time they can be run with a single click. There are various methods, from using custom plug-ins to writting your own script, depending on your skills. This thread covers a few option: ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1055991Photoshop is capable of the same as well as batch processing where it performs a set of instructions for whole groups of files. What I really want to know how to do is create branching instructions, where conditions cause the process to do different things (like rotate only the horizontal pictures in a folder to vertical or something).
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Post by lightning on Oct 22, 2017 2:21:07 GMT -9
You would only need a table when you want to go for direct digital painting. If you draw your stuff old school and then scan it, that works fine too. It depends on what you draw too. If you will only do hull panels of space ships you can work with your line art software of your choice. I have a tablet and have rarely used it because I did not need the "painting" tools so far. I do hope to get there one day. I would say for organic topics (humans, clothing, plants?) the tablet will help more. Of course you could also 3D model all these things and then use a rendered view and something like Illustrators trace option to get to editable drawing shapes.
I do believe that learning to draw first on paper is very helpful but on the other hand from my own experience and what I have heard from others, drawing on a table need a new layer of muscle training. I imagine digital drawing on a screen tablet would be more easy (or similar to paper drawing) as you are "configured" the same way.
But in the end trust your instincts and need (and available resources!) There are always many ways leading to Rome :-)
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Post by Dominic on Oct 23, 2017 22:16:39 GMT -9
As an update regarding 3D models, I have been doing things in Inkscape, using descriptive geometry (awkwardly, since Inkscape is not meant for that) to determine the shape of things. And lots of trial and error. It recently occurred to me that unfolding 3D models might have come some way since I last tried, and (with the help of this thread) I found out that it did! I checked out blender but found the learning curve way too steep (as expected). I could not even find the plugin anywhere in the interface... I have worked with Sketchup before so I gave that a spin, created a model and unfolded it. The plugin does a random unfold, so I took what it gave me and imported it to Inkscape, where I can rearrange the pieces and add flaps. So far, it is looking good. The only thing I need to figure out is scaling and taking into account paper thickness.
And a side note on drawing, I need more practice...
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Post by jeffgeorge on Oct 27, 2017 3:22:04 GMT -9
I do believe that learning to draw first on paper is very helpful but on the other hand from my own experience and what I have heard from others, drawing on a table need a new layer of muscle training. I imagine digital drawing on a screen tablet would be more easy (or similar to paper drawing) as you are "configured" the same way. I agree that one probably needs to do their first little bit of learning to draw on paper, rather than on a tablet, because of the direct connection between the pencil tip and the line it draws. But once you've developed sufficient control that you can reliably draw basic shapes--circle, square, triangle, rectangle--you could probably switch to a tablet without any ill effects. I also agree that there is some new muscle training involved in the switch from pencil and paper to a tablet, but it's a less difficult switch than the conversion from two-fingered hunt-and-peck typing to touch-typing while looking at the screen instead of the keyboard. The first half-hour of drawing on a tablet is going to feel really awkward. The first evening is going to be a bit frustrating. But once you've been doing it for a few hours--less than a day--you're going to have learned to connect the cursor on the screen with the stylus point on the tablet without any trouble. It's a learning curve, but as tech learning curves go, it's a really short one. Now that I'm used to drawing with an off-screen Wacom tablet, I actually am not too interested in drawing on a stylus-on-the-screen system, because that reintroduces one of the disadvantages of drawing on paper--you can't see through your hand. An off-screen tablet lets you see everything around the cursor, including the portion of the image which would be covered by your hand on a pencil-and-paper drawing. This is often really helpful.
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Post by jeffgeorge on Oct 27, 2017 3:22:50 GMT -9
And a side note on drawing, I need more practice... We all do. The only thing standing between me and a successful illustration career is twenty years of daily practice...
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Post by lightning on Nov 4, 2017 23:04:06 GMT -9
And a side note on drawing, I need more practice... We all do. The only thing standing between me and a successful illustration career is twenty years of daily practice...
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Post by Dominic on Nov 7, 2017 22:36:24 GMT -9
I could not find any reference to this, so I'll just ask - what do you use to make layered pdfs? I know Adobe Illustrator can do this and heard that Scribus can, but I did not manage to really access that feature, especially since Scribus appears to be "odd" regarding the use of svg and imported images - at least for me.
Thing is, I have something coming up that comes in several different colors. Come to think of it, having layers might be useful for the Nippers, Snakes etc. But from where I am standing now, it is easier to just make a multipage pdf rather than a single page with layers... At least it feels like it.
Aaaaand disregard this. I found a matching thread in another sub-forum.
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Post by jeffgeorge on Nov 9, 2017 0:05:28 GMT -9
I could not find any reference to this, so I'll just ask - what do you use to make layered pdfs? I know Adobe Illustrator can do this and heard that Scribus can, but I did not manage to really access that feature, especially since Scribus appears to be "odd" regarding the use of svg and imported images - at least for me. Thing is, I have something coming up that comes in several different colors. Come to think of it, having layers might be useful for the Nippers, Snakes etc. But from where I am standing now, it is easier to just make a multipage pdf rather than a single page with layers... At least it feels like it. Aaaaand disregard this. I found a matching thread in another sub-forum. It is possible to make layered PDFs in Scribus, but it requires opening up the PDF file in a text editor after you save it and adjusting the code. There's a thread around here somewhere that explains the process, and it sounds like you already found it. That being said, I only make layered PDFs in Scribus when layered PDFs are the best solution by a substantial margin. Near-duplicate pages in a multi-page PDF is a perfectly viable alternative for most situations, which is used by several of our members who sell excellent cardstock minis through DTRPG. There's more than one way to skin a cat, as they say. (Though I have no idea who needed a skinned cat, and for what purpose, in order to make that up that cliche in the first place...)
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Post by Dominic on Nov 9, 2017 0:45:09 GMT -9
It is possible to make layered PDFs in Scribus, but it requires opening up the PDF file in a text editor after you save it and adjusting the code. There's a thread around here somewhere that explains the process, and it sounds like you already found it. That being said, I only make layered PDFs in Scribus when layered PDFs are the best solution by a substantial margin. Near-duplicate pages in a multi-page PDF is a perfectly viable alternative for most situations, which is used by several of our members who sell excellent cardstock minis through DTRPG. There's more than one way to skin a cat, as they say. (Though I have no idea who needed a skinned cat, and for what purpose, in order to make that up that cliche in the first place...) I believe cat fur is supposed to be gut against rheumatism. But I guess that is beside the point. As far as layers go, I successfully made my first layered pdf yesterday, but I have yet to make it as a multi-page file to compare the size. In the case I am using it (or practicing with it) I am inclined to agree with you. It is basically a colored rectangle that stretches over most the page and comes in different color schemes. I think if the file size is a lot smaller I might go for layered, but in this case, I do not expect it to be the case. It is probably better suited for different options for minis, especially when you want to have all the combinations available. This just in, the file with layers comes to 3.5 MB, the one with the multiple pages (6, actually) is 1.5 MB. I guess that settles it for this instance.
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Post by jeffgeorge on Nov 9, 2017 17:00:25 GMT -9
I believe cat fur is supposed to be gut against rheumatism. But I guess that is beside the point. Duly noted. Thanks for the info! Make sure you test how the layers print. The problem with using Scribus to create multi-layer PDFs is that it Scribus isn't written to allow you to toggle whether or not layers print--you can toggle whether they are visible, but not whether they print. That's why you have to save the file from Scribus, then open it in a text editor and delete certain lines from the code to make it possible to toggle the printing of each layer. Exactly how to do that is described in that other thread on the forum. Thanks very much for sharing that! I wouldn't be surprised if the ratio between multi-layer and multi-page PDFs varies depending on the content of the file, but certainly in this case, I'd go with pages instead of layers too.
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Post by Dominic on Nov 16, 2017 23:23:11 GMT -9
That's why you have to save the file from Scribus, then open it in a text editor and delete certain lines from the code to make it possible to toggle the printing of each layer. Exactly how to do that is described in that other thread on the forum. Thanks for the heads-up. I did try printing/previewing, and it ended up just as described. I then deleted those lines from the file and it worked as advertised. Check out the Paper Brain, which is where I tested it. As you can see, the layer-part covered most of the page, so that is probably a rather extreme case as compared to giving a set of minis a different weapon or headgear.
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Post by DarekPages on Sept 16, 2019 13:49:28 GMT -9
For me, the Wacom tablet is the basis, because drawing is natural to me. My basic software is Krita, Inkscape, InDesign CS2 (which I bought a few years ago). Some people use 3D programs, and I envy them because I practice Blender, but it's difficult. I draw simple blocks in Inkscape "right away". More complicated, I make prototypes - sketches of paper, glue, scissors. I cut and stick. Then it's easy to unfold this block and redraw the walls in Inkscape. Inkscape is very precise. I do the main painting and textures with Krita. It's not as rich as Photoshop, but it's made for painting and drawing. Most of the textures I made were inspired by nature and what I would see. I always have in my pocket a smartphone with a camera, which I always take hundreds of photos. I love stains, dirt, old brick, rust and erosion. I like to know how it looks. Nothing can be factory-made. I use Krita because I like the organicity of manual work. However, I made two figurines in vector (in Inkscape). It is difficult for me to switch to this way of working, to get the right level of organicity. But these figures came out sensational. It is much easier for me to paint by hand. When designing figurines, be careful of small elements that will be difficult to notice. Or when the figurine is printed on plain paper and the minimum resolution is lost when the ink spills.
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