If you use Oekaki Shi-Painter instead of Lascaux Sketch, my question is: what do you use in shi-painter that you find lacking in Lascaux? What would you like to see in Lascaux to consider using it?

The main reason I use shi-painter is because of the softness of the watercolor and pen tools, I don't know how to make/find them in Lascaux. (If anyone knows how to, can they please tell me?)
They other reason is that I'm just not really used to Lascaux, so I feel more comfortable using shi-painter.

I can't fiure out how to even find textures in lascaux and It doesnt really have a one pixel brush, also I like watching the animation which lascaux doesn't do.

Watercolor pen...

I have exactly the same reasons as Punky. :)

I do not have nothing against Lascaux, I really lave that program as much as I love Oekakie Shi Painter, but like my friends say in here, Shi-painter has that amaising soft water color tool that Lascaux doesn't have, and it has the animation thing too, and for other Shi has the copy tool too that Lascaux lacks on it.......D:
But further of all Lascaux is great, and so Shi Painter.......>:D
..............Logging of Lore.V...........

lascaux has soft brushes, but they tend to be harder by default. If you choose a 1 pixel brush and turn down the flow (around 40), you'll get a softer brush, for larger brushes you'll want the flow higher. (it's worth noting that shi-painter works the same way, the difference being it automatically changes your flow when you change the brush size---it's not necessarily a better approach, but perhaps it is)

the only textures lascaux has are halftones (patterns) and diffuse (more of a grain texture), you control them over on the bottom left (manual)

it's worth noting that none of the applets have a real water color tool (comparable to Corel Painter's water color tool), but lascaux does have a blend tool similar to shi-painter's. on Lascaux it's the 'blend' option (manual). it works best when you turn flow (and sometimes opacity) down to about 120 and use the air brush, however, it can be used with other shapes for interesting effects you cannot get in shi-painter.

lascaux does have a copy tool, in fact, several. if you are simply trying to move something (not copy), using the move tool is sufficient (if you want to move a piece, make a selection, then move that). (manual) If you want to copy, do the same, but hold the control key before you start dragging (this is actually not in the manual, and some quick experimenting shows this feature may be buggy--could someone please test it out and see if it works for you!).

as for animation. this is definitely a major feature that distinguishes the two programs. would there be interest in this being added to lascaux? would it make you more or less likely to use lascaux?

I never use the watercolor tool, but the pen tool is like a mix of lascaux's 3rd and 4th brush and thats why I use that for basically everything.

the pen tool is just the 3rd brush with the flow turned down

Lascaux rocks...I love it

It is really about the way the blend brush works.
I have programmed my own painting tool and tried to recreate the feel of the oekaki-shi-painter brush ...and I got it working.
The difference to yours is that it measures the average underlying color not only at the spots where the last mousepoint was tracked but every time a circle is drawn. This is why the lauscaux blend brush seems a lot smoother if you move your mouse slower(causing a smaller space between the mouse coordinates)

It should be easy to change that(or to make it selectable)


Also the lines of the pen brush are smoothed. Draw some very fast lines in lauscaux and oekaki - and you will notice that the lines in lascaux look edgy - not in oekaki. I don't know how you could write a smoothing routine...maybe you look at the source code of oekaki.
Another cool thing about the pen brush is that it leaves a little bit space between the mouse and the actual line...this makes it possible to draw smoother lines if you chose a small brush radius, use 1x zoom and draw slowly.
Also it's not hard to code. ;)


edit - something else important:
The way the colors are mixed in oekaki are different from lascaux(blend/watercolor). Oekaki manages it somehow to actually paint the color you choose, even if you use a very low opacity. In lascaux the drawn color always gets a little bit darker than the original(and it's frustrating when I'm trying to draw exact). I really don't know how oekaki manages this. I tried it with 256*256*256 colors but I ended up having your results.
I guess oekaki is using some fancy tricks to get that working, which should explain why the colors feel very unique.(using only gray it can get slightly saturated)

One solution can be to use a higher count of colors(I'm working with float 0-1 currently and the colors look perfect)...but it won't recreate the feel of shi-painter perfectly. Also it's work plus it causes more processing.

you're correct on most points. unfortunately lascaux would need some serious reworking to implement some of those smoothing techniques and I haven't really felt the motivation to do such.

technically speaking, shi painter does color blending incorrectly, though I haven't really looked into it. lascaux does it incorrectly as well, but that's mainly for efficiency reasons, /256 is a lot faster than /255. :) Though I haven't actually experienced the color getting a little bit darker of which you refer to, can you give a more specific reproducible example?

working in float is not very realistic unless you're dealing with hardware acceleration, there's a trade off in speed between high spatial resolution and color high depth resolution. I'd rather have higher resolution images than higher color depth images.

OK here is the example:
- choose the color gray and fill the image with this color.
- activate blending
- draw with that color (looks ok)
- draw a more saturated and darker colored line(leave some gray)
- draw with the same gray into the saturated spot and back to the gray -> it stays a little bit darker, no matter how long you draw.

-> when the brush hits something darker it can't get back to the original color.

Well yeah keep the color range...it's good that it does not waste so much resources :)

oh oh you mean the water color blending. I thought you referring to regular opacity control.
yes, you are correct, it will never reach the color you actually have at low opacity. the blend tool is a complete hack, but considering how trivial it was to add, it goes a long way. I doubt I would change it without redoing it completely

i think most people use shi-painter because its visually less confusing? maybe you need to add a tutorial if you make a new lascaux :P

personally im using shipainter all the time cause im used to it and i dont need to go playing around and experimenting to find good settings that work for my style (i have it down to specifics in shipainter, and have used the same for a long while) the main things shipainter is awesome for is the smoothness of the pen tool and the smooth blend of the watercolor.. i havent used lascaux in a looong time but i remember something weird about blending over layers? i.e. if i was blending colors it would bleed the lineart or something along those lines?

The thing of it is it's because of the belding tool in Lascaux that I've fallen in absolute love with it. I've tried to get similiar results in Shi and it's like apples and oranges. Shi feels more like an upgraded basic paint program where as Scaux is the closest I've come to Corel draw. I know it's simpler than Corel but it's better than the two programs I have (basic paint and out dated Painter's Classic) Up until coming here I didn't even know what layers were or what a difference it makes. And as for this blend tool in Shi, I never found it, where is it? Is it automatic with your brush strokes? That's what I love about Scaux blend, if I need two colors to smooth together and not be harsh I can use blend and boom, they look like natural gradients (and I have noticed that blend makes it darker, if you put it on low flow and opacity, which is why when I blend a lighter color in I put it on high opacity and flow, takes a bit of practice but it works and I get nicely produced areas of light's, darks and middle colors.)

And though I've tried I JUST can't get clouds to look as realsitic in Shi as I can in Lascaux. That program was made for clouds and water. I do better realism in Scaux then Shi too, I think because it's all to do with blend and as well as the soft airbrush (you can get a watercolor feel with the airbrush as Marcello says on low opacity and flow)

And hey, as much as I would like more textures on Scaux (and I would) I think the angled brushes more than make up for it. I do notice that when I use angled brushes with blend on there leaves behind solid blobs of the brush angle if I do single strokes, the one annoying thing about blend.

The other thing I'd like is to be able to angle the canvas, move it sideways or upside down like Shi. It would make drawing just that much easier, like being able to move a piece of paper around.

One of the things I really don't like about Shi is when you use copy to move something it copies the entire layer and later after you moved it you have to erase the extra bits of the copied piece and can go over and ruin the lineart. This is where Scaux once again proves itself superior. You can choose one area and move it or work on it and not worry about copying the entire layer. It would be nice if there was a way to rotate the selected area, say an arm that needs to be raised, instead of drawing the whole thing over you just select it and use rotaion to move it a cetain degree. That would be sweet. (I'd really like to know what the magic wand does, it's the one tool I can't figure out. Well masking too. I suppose I can go to Wiki for that)

Just one more thing Marcello, this is a question. When I'm selecting a large area to move I press shft so that when I use the dotted circle or square I can slowly outline, say an arm, and then move it, but is there a way to deselect a small area you outlined without using the undo button?

Animation would be nice, but I don't see it as a big priority.

SCAUX ALL THE WAY BABY.

if you use ctrl/shift you can add/remove to a selection. all tools have tips in the status bar about what extra options like that there are.

Personally, I'm a HUGE abuser of the dodge/burn tools. The dodge/burn of Lascaux seems to focus on each individual stroke, and it dodges that stroke until that stroke is white and pixel-edged. Shi-Painter, on the other hand, dodges the whole block of colour uniformly. This is especially noticeable when dodging/burning over an area where there is a transition between colours. Also, the simplicity of Shi-Painter is a huge plus for me. It seems a lot more self-explanatory than Lascaux. Everything is in a cute little rectangle and all the tools can be quickly accessed and changed. The arrows make it quick and easy to reach a particular opacity/size/RGB. It probably has something to do with how
accustomed I am to the arrangement..

One of my personal gripes about Lascaux and most art programs, besides Shi-Painter, is how when a freehand line approaches a point parallel to the vertical/horizontal, it suddenly widens. With Shi-Painter, a 0px line consistently remains a 0px line. This problem is eliminated with the use of pressure sensitivity, but I can't use that so...

I'm sure I wouldn't mind using Lascaux. It seems to have many many capabilities, and features, but that is also what deters me from using it. I'd undoubtedly be tempted to use all the special layer adjustments, and the selection tools, and the gradient tool and such, and that would probably consume a hell of a lot of space. And that would lead to having to requesting for more space etc.. it's too much of a hassle.

Since I can achieve the same effects in Shi-Painter (especially v1.114) as I can with Lascaux in less time and using less space, I don't see why I ought to put myself through that hassle. V1.114 has the one layer adjustment I need most anyway, the Multiply layer option. And it has a "KEEP" bar, to save brush settings, which makes it even easier to access/change brushes.

In short, Shi-Painter saves time and space... heh

dodge/burn can act either way, depending if you use flow or opacity to control the strength. It also depends on what color you choose... perhaps also confusing, but gives you more control once you get into it.

not exactly sure about that line problem you're referring to, but I bet if you're not at 100% in lascaux you won't notice the problem, especially if you have the flow low with a 1px brush.

if you run into space problems regularly with lascaux, let me know and I can raise your limits. I will probably get rid of space limits on 2draw at some point, so it's not really something to be that concerned about.

Silvair, I noticed that about the lines too. It's like there's a shadow when you make a straight line. I usually take the anti/alias off, I get neater lines and to make it less harsh I put the opacity down some. And what Marcello said about using different colors when you use the dodge, you can also use different shades of the same color. If your using yellow for instance and only want a subtle highlight, instead of using the brighter tones just slide the tone to the darker shades and you'll not only have more control, but the highlight won't be as harsh. Using the blend when your using dodge helps too. It makes the highlight look more natural and you can put the opacity/flow a touch higher. But all in all the best way to use dodge in Lascaux is at it's lowest level, sometimes adjusting the O/F as needed. As for the extra tools in the bottom window, those can be helpfull if your experimenting. But I stick with the basics.

Thanks for the tip on the selction tools Cello.

I Actualy use both shi and las often. Almost rotating every other draw. The single biggest gripe I have for Las is that when you copy, you can not flip horizontal/ vertical like youy can in shi. The copy tool is great for moving things around but like Sweetcell said.. puting a rotation tool would be incredibly powerfull. Now.. with shi, the biggest gripe I have is that when I have a draw open, and then say I open a messanger window or media player over the drawing area, it always leaves a black outline of that window. And if you zoom in or out.. it makes lots of frames of the larging or shrinking. This gets quite annoying and I dont know if its just the Java program on my windows or what... Like Sweetcell said.. the blend tool used with lower opacity and airbrush tool in Las is so great for my coloring. I prefer it over Shi as it alwasy seems to muddy up in Shi.. altho that could just be me doing it.. I kinda have a slopy coloring stile.

I love Lascaux, it has really awesome features, but the two things that make me afraid of using it is that it freezes on me often, and I run out of room every time I use it. I don't know if the freezing part is just me, because shi-painter hasn't frozen on me once. Shi-painter lags if I have chat windows open, but Lascaux is fine throughout the entire time I'm drawing (until it freezes). My favorite part of Lascaux is the layering stuff. Duplicating, locking... omg, I just love that so much.
And what Kayos mentioned about shi-painter happens to me (about when you zoom in and move around it makes these weird frames)... eww >.>

that's a known bug in shi painter. I should probably update shi painter, but I seem to recall the last time I did that people complained about other stuff, so I changed it back.

Those frames are only here a problem, but when you push the undo button it's good again. Other oekaki-sites don't have that problem :)

see the message I just posted.
the newer version fixes it, but has new problems people have complained about.

What! When was this update and how the hell did I manage to miss it D:?! (2nd part was rhetorical) What were the new problems with the Shi-update?

And thanks so much for the Lascaux info, Marcello and Sweetcell. I also figured out that I forgot about the Blend checkbox.. and the flow rate, and the zoom options hehe.. my bad.

what is this "other oekaki sites" of which you refer to? D:

www.senile.nl -> They have Shi-painter 1.08
www.fearsome-oekaki.com -> I've no idea which Shi-painter they use. :)

1.114 is out, I can look into trying that out.

I find that the wierd frames and outlines go away when I minimize the page and maximize it again.

I experience the weird frames and outlines also in shi.

what I do is I click on the corner of the box to enlargen it, then re-click again to normal size, then the lines are gone!