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gdenby

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Posts posted by gdenby

  1. My purchase  decision for the Huion was guided by 2 things.

     

    1. The price. Tho' not quite as capable as a comparable sized Wacom, the company has a decent reputation. So for about 1/3rd the price, I figured it was worth a try. Self indulgent, but not too much.

     

    2. I used to have a 9 x 12 Intuos 2. I always felt my motions were cramped. I suppose it was the fault of the applications, but often the brush would stop before the edge of the digital canvas, and  I had to lift up and resume. Because for expressive work, I like a broad sweeping gesture. my Huion allows that when I want it. Most of the time, no. A smaller drawing area would suffice.

  2. I have a somewhat larger model, the WH1 1409. Aside from the size, my model has the same range of pressure sensitivity but a 20% finer resolution. Both are far beyond what my somewhat arthritic hands can achieve. 

     

    Wacom has models w. more pressure levels, but for me, they would be useless.

     

    Small downside, the work surface is rather slick.

     

    It appears that the pen charge wears out before the tablet charge. That has been slightly irksome. While the tablet is wireless, it can also be used w. a long USB cable. The pen charge cable is much shorter, and so if the pen needs charging, there's no good way to use the tablet for several hours.

  3. Him Floor,

     

    I haven't used Illustrator for years, and only once or twice for floor plans. But I think I know what you want.

     

    AD has extensive "snapping" features. By default, they are turned off. You can turn them on by clicking the small magnet icon on the top bar. There is a pop down menu button right next to it where about 12 different options may be selected. If you watched the Affinity tutorials, you may have seen the ones on using the grid as an aid for drawing architectural shapes. Once the grid has been defined,you can snap objects and nodes to it.

  4. Brandon, HoJo,

     

    I suspect you are looking for a dimension tool. That is, for a ruler, a click on one node, and then a click on another produces a line w. the dimensions typed in. Or a protractor that can be centered and rotated, producing an arc w. the degree info. 

     

    Those don't exist in AD. All the info is there, but no auto display of it

     

    Its easy to set up a grid to correspond to a dimension set so that w. snapping, objects can be drawn to standard units. Say, a grid off 144 pt, and switch between subdivisions of 12, 24, 36, 48 for 1", 1/2", 1/3" etc. w.snapping on

     

    I suppose a CAD program is more appropriate for your uses.

  5. Mucha, Dance 1898 (final and a sketch).

     

    Interesting (but not surprising) what they included, excluded, altered, and *cough* enhanced :wub: . 

     

    post-12544-0-96545400-1486413699.png

     

    Good work!

     

    Let me deprecate my post of a few minutes ago. I see the original was rather extensively edited. The characteristic symbol halo gone, fine shading, compressing some of the horizontal extent.

     

    The logo is sufficiently different that I didn't really look closely at any of Mucha's work.

  6. Yeah, I don't think it's Mucha either and I also cannot find an original. Would be interested to know should you find where it's from.

     

    Looked over a few thousand images via search. Nothing very close. The difference in line widths from outlines to inner lines were fairly common. The was an Austrian named Moser who used similar technique, but his work was more in a relief style. The flowing lines looked more like a French style, and I found 1 example from a fellow named Engelbrecht working in Paris that had lots of flowing lines. 

     

    Came across an article that said the downfall of the style was that it was so popular that there were many practitioners, but few who were distinctive.

  7. Ha! Yes, I am very good!!  ;)

     

    .... But seriously, I went to their website. They've got a bunch of PR downloads. PDF's with vector art.  B)

     

    I found a .jpg on the site. Cleaned it up, and resampled it. Ran it thru Image Vectorizer. Got a slightly cleaner bunch of lines than what you posted, about 60 K smaller file. Messed a bit w. deleting useless nodes. Reduced the files size about 10K. With way too much work, I suppose it could be around half the size.

     

    I'd like to find the original art that was digitized. Pretty sure its not Mucha, but by one of many nouveau illustrators.

  8. 1) how do I duplicate the group/image-as-a-whole...then separate (drag?) the dup from the original?

     

    When an object or groupis duplicated or copied and pasted, the new items are left where the originals were. They are stacked on top of the originals. Right after the operation, the new items are selected, and can then be moved to another position. If not immediately used, select the object/group from the layer list while using the move tool. The item(s) will be high lighted. Move, rotate, etc as you like.

  9. Might have been a lot of work, but it looks good.

     

    I've been doing digital line work of various items, mostly decorative motifs ranging from ancient Chinese bronze, Roman acanthus, art nouveau glazed tiles, etc. etc. for more than a decade.

     

    Frankly, I've never come upon a method that was very easy. Mostly it comes down to using the software as adeptly as possible. My first work w. AD was painfully slow and uneven. But I'm becoming more facile. After working on a carpet palmate motif for several days, this morning I came up w. a technique of roughing every thing in with sharp nodes, and then easily tweaking the lines into curves. Did as much work in 15 min as I was doing in an hour struggling to get smooth nodes properly laid out and balanced.

     

    As is so often the case, practice makes perfect.

     

    It will help when the auto trace feature is implemented. Corel's tracer was pretty good. That often saved about half the time to make a transcription. But if the starting photo or scan was poor, it would still produce hundreds of extra points  that had to be erased.

  10. 1st, TurboCooler, let me apologize for being abrupt. I'd had some dental work done earlier in the day, and the pain killer was wearing off. I was far too irritable to be posting.

     

    And while I know very little about laser cutters, I think the pie with a hole of 100% probably would work. In .svg code, a single arc is duplicated when using the pie/donut, one forward, and then reverse. There is an extremely small shift from one side of the empty shape to the other. The files I made showed about 1/1000000 of an inch +- movement. I suppose the cutter might waste time retracing the arc, and then have to step to the next line segment. Doable I suppose, but clumsy.

  11. Somewhat surprising. I did some experiments. It appears to me that if the opacity is anything less than 100%, the whole of the pixel layer is made less opaque. When opacity is at 100%, the grey scale of the mask works as expected. If the mask is turned off, the pixel painting is presented as if never masked.

     

    My guess is that the intent of masking a pixel layer is to edit the pixels. Then the whole of the layer w. masks can be rasterized to get the desired result.

  12. FWIW, I had a bunch of old .ai files in a folder, and tried to open them in AD. Only got a black page. Upon inspecting the file contents in an editor, I found that all were exported from Corel Draw 10, which I believe was the last version Illustrator also opened. Also slightly predates Illustrator outputing .pdf.

  13. I'm not sure there is an efficient method.

     

    The figures would be a fair amount of pen snapping to a grid. Tedious, but fairly easy. Some of the parts could be reused. But the lighting/shadow effects would be quite difficult in my experience. And there is reflection, and perhaps some depth of field. 

     

    Also, the edges of the "blocks" appear to be slightly rounded.

     

    I used to do a lot of 3d work, and a scene like that would have been fairly easy. It would just be a matter of drawing flat shapes w. slight rounded corners, and extruding them. The program I used most had surface pre-sets for metals, plastic, glass, etc.The lights and reflections would likewise be pretty easy. 

     

    But I gave it a quick shot. The attached pic was about 40 min of work. My 1st time using the isometric grid, which may not have been the best choice.

     

    post-34886-0-00667500-1486043399_thumb.jpg

  14. 2 questions:

     

    If you are using one of the built in shape tools, have you converted the shape to curves. The built in forms are different from plain vectors, because they have the ability to have rounded curves etc. May not be directly useable until made ordinary vectors.

     

    Does the laser cutter driver have a recommended file type?

     

    What format are you exporting?  I looked at Inkscape and AD .svg files, and there doesn't seem to be a big difference in the description of the shape. Other formats, I haven't a clue.

  15. Well file size is sadly ~33 MB and thus exceeds the forums max single file size (of 20 MB ?), so I didn't tried to attach it at all. - Otherwise would have attached it here for the community!

     

    Nice work.

     

    I have to suppose the bitmaps are attached to the style, thus the large size.

     

    Perhaps you might post a small tute showing steps to make just 1 example.

  16. Hello. I am Vicki and I'm considering buying Affinity Designer for Windows.

     

    I am not a professional designer and totally self taught on PhotoImpact back when it was from Ulead. I feel pretty at ease with their older version but I know I need to upgrade to something else. I would really like to get some feedback on how user friendly this program is for a novice?

     

    Thank You so much for your time, Vicki :)

     

    From what I can see, PhotoImpact is aimed more at photo enhancement than vector work. Designer might not be quite what you want as a replacement, but Photo might.

     

    I have Designer. Designer has some features that are amazingly easy to use. Others are not immediately obvious. And if coming from another program as I did  (I used Corel Draw a lot, Illustrator less), it took a little while to orient myself to how Designer did the same things. 

     

    Also, it took some time getting used to the user interface. Again, that was mostly a matter of learning a new habit. Overall, the program functions are well grouped and easily accessible. There's just a lot of them.

     

    There is a workbook available. It is extensive, and touches on about everything AFAIK.

     

    I haven't got Photo yet. I'm still trying to get a handle on everything Designer does. Designer has the same "layer adjustments" as Photo, allowing all sorts of color effects and tweaks. But Photo has many filters like Photoshop. And a whole bunch of other stuff. Not user unfriendly, just lots and lots of possibilities.

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