I’ve never been any sort of graphic designer, but I did take the time to understand it some years ago when there was a gap in the market for inexpensive vector-graphics software, following Illustrator going to a subscription model, that I thought I might fill. I imagine the lobste.rs audience would rather hear this perspective from a programmer, anyway.
This is a well-chosen narrow slice of important features. From the write-up (I can’t try it out here on Chrome OS), it’s not clear whether manual spline editing is still possible or not. Contrary to the marketing text, these are certainly still some sort of spline, even if that’s not the intended conceptual model for users; otherwise this would either be raster art, or have unnecessary sharp corners. :) It seems intended for animated cartoons; you certainly wouldn’t use it for professional illustration, nor for page layout.
(I wish I’d actually gained this understanding of the several use-cases for vector art, and their different needs, when I was trying to write my thing, rather than in retrospect. Oh well. :))
It’s worth noting, by the way, that the “sculpting” tool is the only one mentioned that I’m not sure Illustrator offers. As the write-up mentions, it’s inspired by a tool used in 3D modelling for “organic” shapes such as faces. It’s nicely suited to that, but absolutely horrible if you want sharp edges or corners.
It seems like the hope is that the “painting” tool will obviate the need for an explicit notion of Boolean shape combination. That seems quite reasonable, actually; Illustrator has little reason to try to remove a feature it’s always had in favor of a new one that it took a while to sell people on, but, especially for character art with lots of solid-fill regions, it may even be better - since one won’t need to dig into the nesting structure to make changes to shapes within it.
I imagine an early revision is going to add a “simplify” tool which, in one way or another, reduces the number of control points in an area to make the curve feel more dramatic. The user interface around specifying which part of a curve turns out to be a pain to design - do you draw a loop around it? Brush along it? Brush across it? So it makes sense to leave that for a later version. I definitely don’t think leaving control points entirely un-editable is feasible without this, but it will fill the most obvious reason to me for needing to edit them in this type of artwork.
The onion-skinning and split-pane modes are essential. They’re exactly the kind of thing a lot of low-end vector-art software leaves off, because it’s difficult to implement, and they’re only really a part of the workflow for an experienced artist, but they’re essential - it would be like selling a compiler that (somehow) inherently can never be used with version control, because you’re targeting college students who don’t understand why they need it.
The program being developed by researchers doesn’t give me a lot of hope for it getting the kind of love it will need for a few years if it’s going to be the kind of game-changer I’m sure everyone would like it to. Amusingly, the fact they’re collecting email addresses does give me that hope; it seems to be open-source, so it’s not clear how they plan to fund development, but it strongly suggests that they do have a plan.
I’ve never been any sort of graphic designer, but I did take the time to understand it some years ago when there was a gap in the market for inexpensive vector-graphics software, following Illustrator going to a subscription model, that I thought I might fill. I imagine the lobste.rs audience would rather hear this perspective from a programmer, anyway.
This is a well-chosen narrow slice of important features. From the write-up (I can’t try it out here on Chrome OS), it’s not clear whether manual spline editing is still possible or not. Contrary to the marketing text, these are certainly still some sort of spline, even if that’s not the intended conceptual model for users; otherwise this would either be raster art, or have unnecessary sharp corners. :) It seems intended for animated cartoons; you certainly wouldn’t use it for professional illustration, nor for page layout.
(I wish I’d actually gained this understanding of the several use-cases for vector art, and their different needs, when I was trying to write my thing, rather than in retrospect. Oh well. :))
It’s worth noting, by the way, that the “sculpting” tool is the only one mentioned that I’m not sure Illustrator offers. As the write-up mentions, it’s inspired by a tool used in 3D modelling for “organic” shapes such as faces. It’s nicely suited to that, but absolutely horrible if you want sharp edges or corners.
It seems like the hope is that the “painting” tool will obviate the need for an explicit notion of Boolean shape combination. That seems quite reasonable, actually; Illustrator has little reason to try to remove a feature it’s always had in favor of a new one that it took a while to sell people on, but, especially for character art with lots of solid-fill regions, it may even be better - since one won’t need to dig into the nesting structure to make changes to shapes within it.
I imagine an early revision is going to add a “simplify” tool which, in one way or another, reduces the number of control points in an area to make the curve feel more dramatic. The user interface around specifying which part of a curve turns out to be a pain to design - do you draw a loop around it? Brush along it? Brush across it? So it makes sense to leave that for a later version. I definitely don’t think leaving control points entirely un-editable is feasible without this, but it will fill the most obvious reason to me for needing to edit them in this type of artwork.
The onion-skinning and split-pane modes are essential. They’re exactly the kind of thing a lot of low-end vector-art software leaves off, because it’s difficult to implement, and they’re only really a part of the workflow for an experienced artist, but they’re essential - it would be like selling a compiler that (somehow) inherently can never be used with version control, because you’re targeting college students who don’t understand why they need it.
The program being developed by researchers doesn’t give me a lot of hope for it getting the kind of love it will need for a few years if it’s going to be the kind of game-changer I’m sure everyone would like it to. Amusingly, the fact they’re collecting email addresses does give me that hope; it seems to be open-source, so it’s not clear how they plan to fund development, but it strongly suggests that they do have a plan.
I look forward to seeing what this becomes!