Moho Forum

What is the best production tool for creating backgrounds? Obviously there is Photoshop and illustrator but there are others like Xara and some others from the Corel stable which spring to mind.

But what are peoples favorites - are there any dark horse programs out there which should be featuring higher on the production radar. Personal favorites like DPaint IV disappeared with the Amiga. there was another which allowed the importation of user created animated brushes - an amazing feature for rapid background development.

Is there still a place for watercolors, paper and a scanned/ Be interested to hear others people's comments - we spend heaps of time talking about animation techniques but little time on the other big element in films.

Rhoel

After I complained a lot about its unusual user interface, I finally rely on TVpaint for all my backgrounds. It features nearly-natural media, which is good enough for my purposes, and is extremely fast - even faster than Photoshop, especially with bigger brushes.

Personally I like Project Dogwaffle pro.
It's a little different than Photoshop in the way it uses "buffers" for alpha channels and cut/paste but it has the usual layer interface.

Lots of brushes and includes particle brushes which can create interesting fractal strokes. (great to make grass, trees, organic weird-stuff or any type of alpha'd splat)

The buffers are the only complex thing to wrap your head around, once you get past that the usual functions are like using photoshop or Gimp.

It has excellent animation capabilities as well, as that was what it's creator intended to use it for.

Check it out here:
http://www.dogwaffle.info/

i own artrage- might want to look into it for backgrounding... i also own xara... i was thinking though... why not just make it all in AS???

maybe that would be not a smart idea... hrummm

RonC

Magnatude wrote:Personally I like Project Dogwaffle pro.
It's a little different than Photoshop in the way it uses "buffers" for alpha channels and cut/paste but it has the usual layer interface.

Lots of brushes and includes particle brushes which can create interesting fractal strokes. (great to make grass, trees, organic weird-stuff or any type of alpha'd splat)

The buffers are the only complex thing to wrap your head around, once you get past that the usual functions are like using photoshop or Gimp.

It has excellent animation capabilities as well, as that was what it's creator intended to use it for.

Check it out here:
http://www.dogwaffle.info/

Yup, i second PD Pro!

I've used Corel Panter. It has a large variety of paint brushes in different media. It also has a palette where you can mix your colors on.

Udd

Ah, I forgot to mention that I still use non-digital tools: real paper and real brushes and real paint. Nowadays the results often end up as fills or textures in my digitally created backgrounds, but I thought I should mention. No use to pretend natural media could be created digitally as easy as traditionally.

rpc9943 wrote:I was thinking though... why not just make it all in AS???

The answer is I do sometimes - the noisy line option is great for creating that 50's style of ink outline which doesn't quite matching a fill. ASP has its place.

But for Japanese anime backgrounds, ASP is not much good. PhotoShop and illustrator are excellent but output is slow. The fractal/particle brush in www.dogwaffle.info looks interesting, very similar to one I had back on the Amiga. Animated brushes are able to rapidly develop a background, in a consistent style.

TVpaint I had forgotten - need to go to the software center and see what is available locally. Might even find ASP6 on sale there


Rhoel

PD Pro has your AnimBrushes too. Unfortunately they aren't as advanced as the Amiga version as you don't see an image once you've picked it up so you are stamping the brushes down 'blind'.

Twisted Brush is very good. It also has loads of time saving particle brushes. I always use it for skies as I find the 'space cloud' (I think that's what it's called) brush invaluable for this.
http://www.pixarra.com/
There's a free version too.

sounds like none of you have used artrage.... please look it up and try it out...

rpc9943 wrote:sounds like none of you have used artrage.... please look it up and try it out...

I use Artrage, but prefer Sai Paint Tool over anything for drawing and painting.

Not the case. I use Artrage probably more than any other software. I sketch in Artrage and do all my storyboarding using it too. I love Artrage. It's nice and fast to use and for the money probably the best painting software there is.

I've used Artrage, its nice and would work fine for Backdrops, and works well for creating "painted" looking materials.

Every tool has its features that I think a lot of us like.
Some of us like certain tools because of effects that we may stylize over, its all personal preference and perhaps a bit of ease-of-use that defines what we like.


Corel Draw X3 is another tool that works excellent for creating vector backgrounds. The Artistic Media brush makes lines look like Anime Studio lines (with neat tapered ends) So if you are looking for another software to do crisp vector lines Corel Draw works well.

I actually use Corel X3 to trace over my 3D renders to create comic book illustration images, I've also considered using Anime Studio to render single frames for comic book panels, mainly because I like the way the lines look in both programs (and the ease of manipulating the lines after placing them)

I have used farcry and farcry 2 for backgrounds.

Dale

hmmm i am sorry guys, i was just surprised artrage wouldn't be mentioned... i really love that program

I was thinking... I am going to have backgrounds with a cityscape... not sure maybe I should check out Google Sketchup and start designing some buildings, render, and then throw into artrage and go from there... Not sure yet though what exactly I should do...

RonC