Paintstorm similar to BlackINK

[Rabcor]

I'm finding that Paintstorm Studio 2 has an uncanny similarity with BlackINK, I mean I'm thinking like it may have even been done by the same developers...

Just check out the free trial, some aspects of the interface are eerily similar, and I'm even finding that some issues (such as choppy cursor movement) which I'm getting on BlackINK also happen in Paintstorm, it's like as if the code were copied, they even also did it in OpenGL, support macs and have a working Linux beta.

Coincidence?

Either way, it seems like the development on BlackINK is still stunted while Paintstorm is basically wrecking photoshop and even the king (Corel Painter) for digital painting purposes... It doesn't have Black INK's iconic brush engine but, other than that, I think it's the new king of digital painting, I really like it but it's somehow suspicious how strikingly similar they look and feel, either way, for those waiting for Black INK to finish some time next century, you can try this instead while you wait.

[Explosive_Crab]

It looks pretty interesting. However, Black ink is positioned on bitmap drawing. From the video on Paintstorm Studio you can see that it uses vector graphics. It's too early to say anything, but thanks for the tip-off.

[Rabcor]

Paintstorm (as the name suggests) uses raster (or as you like to call it, bitmap) graphics.

It just also has vector tools, like any respectable painting software (Black INK should also have it eventually, if you know, it ever gets actually developed) but it's primarily for painting in raster graphics like everything else. You don't need a video btw, there's a free trial. I'm trying it. (Loving it too)

Also, Paintstorm only costs $20... much less than Black INK

[Explosive_Crab]

Oddly, in Russia, black ink costs about 15$

[u2bleank]

Rabcor : Black Ink is actively developed and I don't like your words and your insinuation.
You can give your advice and judgment about what is Black Ink and Paintstorm but I'm quiet upset when you say that we done nothing and are “lazy”.
I think you misunderstanding our philosophy. We are more focused on quality than in feature quantity.

Anyway a difference between Black Ink and Paintstorm is the ability for Black Ink to handle ( for example ) a 10Kx10k drawing with a smudge effect flawlessly.
Or the possibility to code the pixel behavior of any brush with a code editor ( which is not really usefull for an artist only point of view but open an infinity of possibility to create new brushes effects ).
Finally we are not focused to redo a new Photoshop or Corel Painter clone but to create a Digital Drawing program that use generative and procedural algorithm everywhere ( and I hope that one day we will be the Houdini of 2D Painting;) ).

[Explosive_Crab]

Originally posted by u2bleank:

I hope that one day we will be the Houdini of 2D Painting;.

Strong statement) I hope I wouldn't die from happiness when it happens.

[Rabcor]

Originally posted by u2bleank:

Rabcor : Black Ink is actively developed and I don't like your words and your insinuation.
You can give your advice and judgment about what is Black Ink and Paintstorm but I'm quiet upset when you say that we done nothing and are “lazy”.
I think you misunderstanding our philosophy. We are more focused on quality than in feature quantity.

Anyway a difference between Black Ink and Paintstorm is the ability for Black Ink to handle ( for example ) a 10Kx10k drawing with a smudge effect flawlessly.
Or the possibility to code the pixel behavior of any brush with a code editor ( which is not really usefull for an artist only point of view but open an infinity of possibility to create new brushes effects ).
Finally we are not focused to redo a new Photoshop or Corel Painter clone but to create a Digital Drawing program that use generative and procedural algorithm everywhere ( and I hope that one day we will be the Houdini of 2D Painting;) ).

Yes I did notice that Black INK does have superior performance, I never called you lazy, I said development seems stunted. But in hindsight it seems a little unfair of me since I haven't really tested the program in a rather long time and you just released an update the other day, I just strongly remember 2 years of no updates, and how many years ago was it when you said a macOS release was around the corner after which you would make a linux version? What ever happened to that? I'm still pretty bugged out about that. Before 2017 your last update was in 2015 dude, it sorta gives the impression that you're not exactly working full time of this if there pass 2 years between updates, what is there to misunderstand about that huge gap? It's like how I didn't draw for a full year once, I didn't upload anything cus I wasn't drawing, was that simple.

I sorta wrongly assumed that there'd still been no updates since 2015, but guess there were. Looking at your software now, it seems a lot more usable than when I first tried it.

People would have a lot more faith in your work if you kept us posted about it more often. Anyhow, since you've come a bit further than 'canvas with a brush engine' now, I'm actually a little bit excited to see what this baby can do, now that you've proven that the project is actually not dead, I want to believe in you again even if I still can't take you seriously until I get that Linux version (Paintstorm has a working Linux beta already, just saying, BlackINK is actually older than paintstorm too)

Anyhow, you can soon expect me to test the living ♥♥♥♥ out of your software scouring for every little thing I can love and every little thing I can hate, everything important that's missing (every brush I can't make!!) and I'm gonna give you some actually useful feedback at the end of it. I want Black INK to succeed, I want Black INK to be cross platform so I can actually use it in my preferred work environment (otherwise it's like a dead dream for me anyways...) thus of course I want to like it. And in your favor, I like working with huge resolutions too :D (And I even have a 980-Ti to power this thing so should be good right?) so I can sort of update my opinions about this software, since after all my first impression was 'canvas and a brush engine' there was literally nothing else in the program, hardly any UI to speak of even, but I can see that in 2017 you FINALLY updated things.

Anyhow my first suggestion is that if you don't want it to appear like the project is dead, give us updates on what you're working on at least every couple of months!

I'm a big fan of the quality over quantity mentality, but there are limits to how much of a perfectionist you should allow yousrelf to be, every artist knows this, and every producer knows this too. But as I happen to also be a programmer, I understand exactly how you feel.

So, I'm working on a little project in Krita now before I leave it behind (it's what I've been using all this time) in favor of paintstorm, after which I will thoroughly do what I just said I'd do with blackink to paintstorm (aka I'm gonna master it's brush engine, bend it to my will and maybe paint something) and then it's Black INK's turn, I look forward to it, but gotta keep at least some order in my life :P

Wanting to be the houdini of digital painting is a bold statement, although you can just forget that photoshop even exists since Photoshop is mostly an image editor and not painting software (try Illustrator...) but Corel Painter on the other hand, Corel Painter is the king you should be trying to topple. If you can do evreything corel painter can, but faster and better, you are officially the new king of digital painting. The same doubly applies for paintstorm, the reason paintstorm managed to develop so well so fast is because they are hyper focused, there is no bloat, almost every feature is extremely helpful for any painter. The only thing they have that you might not need to worry much about is vectors. I mean look, they don't even have a text-writing tool! (That could be useful for painting, but I mean, you can do that in just about any other program anyways, save it as PNG then copy it in, job done)

I'm rooting for you, but you gotta keep us posted that you haven't given up on the project because it is incredibly common for programmers to start with big projects like this then drop them halfway through. I've simply been scared of that happening, which is why I've mostly stayed away after my first impression.

[u2bleank]

Wow what an answer.
I think it’s cool to be so reasoned in your text so I will try to do the same.

For a start, there wasn’t 2 years but 18 months since the last update ( from September 2015 to January 2017 ).
That’s because we had to integrate BSL[docs.google.com] in Black Ink.
That was a delicate operation because it was previously not planned from the beginning of the developpement (we had to create the language, to implement it, enable the system to do a ReadBack using the GPU on huge resolutions without a loss of performance, have dynamic parameters, etc.).
It has been a long and hard work (and, I assure you, it was a full time job) but I hope it will add great value to Black Ink because it’s, as far as I know, the first software to give the user the possibility of programming brushes at a pixel level.
And I don’t think it exists yet a software on that market that is able to do smudges[forum.bleank.com] in 10Kx10K resolutions.

Concerning the MacOS (and Linux) version, the port is not as easy as it can be for a videogame or other softwares because our shaders are generated on the fly.
In videogames and other softwares, the shaders are written once and for all, and you only need to rewrite them in GLSL to make that port. Moreover, at that time there was no library that did the job correctly, back in 2013.
So, we made our own parser and it took more time than we anticipated.
This step is now almost completed, and the OpenGL 4.1 version of Black Ink will function within months, the actual port to MacOS will then start at that time.

Concerning the lack of communication we are aware of that problem… ;)
Generally, we communicate only when things we’ve been working on are done ( and not as much as we should ).
We would need some kind of Community Manager with good drawing and technical skills, and who likes to communicates about what they’re doing and about what happens… (this is a subliminal call for help)

Corel Painter (that I don’t know very well at all) seems, to me, to be quiet slow.
For example, when using the particles function, I have to make a stroke and then wait to see the final result...
Paintstorm is a software among so many others… There are also Krita, Artrage, SketchBook, MisChief… All of them have strengths and weaknesses.
But our approach differs from them on the technical, low level side, in the creation of brushes, that we want to expose to the user.
For that matter, Houdini is a reference for us.
Of course, predefined brushes exist but someone with some technical skills should be able to create their own unique brushes or procedural effects that we wouldn’t have imagined.
All of that with keeping a simple and not intimidating UI.
Finally, from the beginning of Black Ink development, we have always done our best to achieve a maximum in fluidity and reactivity, so as to best convey the sensation of drawing on real paper.


I will stop there, it feels like I’ve done the amount of communication for the next 3 years ;)

[Rabcor]

Haha, allright, I feel like I understand much better what's been up now. I'd probably consider becoming a community manager for you, but I'm not very confident in my drawing skills (although I am quite good with technicals and I like to talk about what I'm doing, I like it a bit too much maybe, I mean look at how long my posts tend to be!) but I think my biggest problem is lousy communication skills, or to be more specific, I tend to have a bit of tough luck controlling my emotions about things when I have things to say, I'm honest to a fault too, undesirable traits for a community manager :) hope you find someone though!

Anyhow, your only competition in speed is Paintstorm, and you're winning by a couple of miles, but I don't think they're gonna idle around, their gpu accelerated brush engine feels like it's pretty beta, it even has some serious bugs (like issues with working with bristles and stuff) their engine is also a lot simpler than yours so catching up is easier for them than for you. They're also ahead of you in mac and linux support. But no rush I guess, do it well instead of doing it fast, I like that philosophy.

But everyone in the know knows that for digital painting, corel painter is king, corel painter is to digital painting what photoshop is to image editing. Although most artists seem to end up using photoshop (this is probably because the brush engine of PS is orders of magnitude simpler and easier to tame), nothing captures the feel of traditional painting as well as corel painter. I don't personally use it (I found it's brush engine settings mega confusing, although just like black ink I'll probably give it another try) but for painting, make no mistake, this should be your target competition in the painting field (consider everything else as just noise), so you might want to consider getting to know it better and try to get a read on what it does to be so damn good. Painter 2018 was just released too, they said something about speed improvements so maybe they're not so slow anymore after all (I don't know cus I haven't tried it, I'd be pretty surprised if they had gpu accelerated brushes now though)

But yeah even so, I really hate corel and adobe, their prices are freakin absurd! and corel is butthurt about how nobody liked their linux distro so no linux version, adobe is too much of an apple sellout to make a linux version or something. But I just don't like these corporations overall for many reasons, they're ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ all round.

Anyhow, I look forward to testing Black INK again, I have high hopes for your brush engine so I will push it to some heights, but I won't just try to create weird cool brushes, I will also try to create more traditional digital painting brushes. I don't know about going as far as programming my brushes just yet, but I will go as far as the GUI will let me this time :)

Using OpenGL 4.1 will probably be a bit of a challenge, GL 4.5 is where it's at these days, so good luck with that :)

[xyzt]

So, I remember time and again comparing BlackInk to Houdini. Wow, it's finally getting shared, lol.

I have always thought this about BlackInk, the nodal brush engine from the beginning was a dead give away. The only problem is... Houdini is entirely nodal with all tools and all tool interactions. Which... one, puts Houdini into, Dreamworks and Pixar worlds, and two, would pretty much be the most awesome thing I've ever seen in a 2D painting application when I get to see it exist.

So, I say, go u2bleank, pull it off, turn BlackInk into entirely nodal with all tools and all tool interactions. Change the layers to nodes that can be connected, disconnected, reconnected at a different point in time at any time, and reorganized at leisure. Make applied brush strokes nodes that can be connected, disconnected, reconnected at a different point in time at any time, and reorganized at leisure. Organize the nodes by type of brush stroke, so 50 brush strokes using the same stroke would be automatically made neat and tidy in it's own nodal container that can be expanded to work with those brush strokes. Utilize zooming in and out and panning in a new brush strokes nodes organizer. I've been calling this forever, u2bleank. Pull it off. Prove it can be done. So I can recommend BlackInk to others by saying the same thing I say about Houdini and only about Houdini, 'it doesn't get better than this', and 'pure nodal means it's like I never made a mistake.'

What makes Houdini so ridiculous is there is no permanence of any kind because pure nodal makes any action from any point in time a toy to play with at any time. And this last sentence is the eventual goal of BlackInk, right? "non-realistic GPU based painting application"

Thanks, u2bleank. (-=`

[u2bleank]

southpawami : +1 for the request :))))

[Man in Machine]

I see the bat signal, but being a lurker doesn't make me batman. I'll put on the cape and tights if you want. Just finished consolidating main and side businesses today, so I think I'll have more time now.

[Rabcor]

Still testing paintstorm :P realized I have to get some actual painting done between testing of programs so I will be ab it delayed in giving blackink it's second chance.

[Rabcor]

Allright I gave it another run, was unimpressed, couldn't even set up a super basic brush due to lack of brush settings (imagine that! lol) anyhow I updated my review, it's probably more fair now considering I acknowledged the usefulness of Black INK for concept artists and texture creation, speaking of texture creation you should probably add a seamless mode to make it the best program for texture creation (besides perhaps substance painter where you can paint directly on the models lol). shouldn't be that hard right? anyhow I hope you do address the issues I mentioned in my updated review about missing brush settings.

You should also work towards making a simplified brush engine settings (something similar to paintstorm studio or corel painter, which is still pretty complicated compared to most programs, but it's much easier to understand than all these math thingys in the node editor).

Such a feature would make Black INK much more accessible for beginner and novice artists; and also artists who don't have a masters degree in mathematics.

[u2bleank]

couldn't even set up a super basic brush due to lack of brush settings

What do you want to achieve perhaps I can help you.

speaking of texture creation you should probably add a seamless mode to make it the best program for texture creation

+1 for the request

[Rabcor]

Originally posted by u2bleank:

couldn't even set up a super basic brush due to lack of brush settings

What do you want to achieve perhaps I can help you.

speaking of texture creation you should probably add a seamless mode to make it the best program for texture creation

+1 for the request

Well, I struggle to fully define what I want in explanation, however for example in photoshop you have an "opacity" setting and a "flow" setting, these things have different effects, I normally leave opacity at 100% and adjust the flow. I think what flow does is reduce the amount of "pigment" or just density of the stroke whereas opacity just changes the transparency.

In paintstorm studio "opacity" is the same as flow and what is normally called opacity is called "transparency" there, they also have an interesting setting called color amount which again is hard to explain. But basically it's a blending setting, if you reduce the color amount, then it will pick up the color that you're painting on on the canvas, otherwise it works quite similar to flow.

For scatter I expect scatter to work more like it does in say Krita, just try it out and you'll see the difference.

The color amount thing may not be necessary (corel painter has a similar thing, this essentially just emulates how real paintbrushes work, when they run out of pigment they start mixing around what's already there) but having "flow" is an absolute must.

Last but not least, I want to suggest again as I did in my revised review that you create a simplified brush settings menu, you can have "simple" and "advanced" mode with advanced being the current node editor, I think the biggest issue with your node editor is that it uses all sorts of math terminology and not all artists are university graduates, I honestly didn't understand half of this ♥♥♥♥ cus I'm a college dropout (I can program tho :D so I did understand the shader scripting language), there needs to be a brush setting interface that's readable to people (aka us idiots) who forgot most of the ♥♥♥♥ they were taught in maths class (sadly more comman than you'd think :( ) to make the program more accessible and better suited to your average painter.

I mean there's a lot of artists who never finished college, why do you think they're artists? :D

And besides that, even fi I do understand a lot of the math terminology, I completely fail to see the context between flooring and fractions and powers with... Opacity and size? What the hell am I supposed to do with addidition, substraction, multiplication or division for brush size? How does that even work? I just completely and utterly fail to understand how this is supposed to be used, and hey I'm willing to admit that that's partially a shortcoming of mine... But I'm not a complete idiot, I can understand paintstorm studio's brush engine, corel painter's, krita's... most people can't even understand photoshop's (mostly cus they never try lol), but your brush engine I don't understand heads nor tails of it, I think this quite limits your potential userbase and should be addressed, try making a simpler or easier brush engine customization interface, get some inspiration from maybe paintstorm, corel painter and krita for how you could do that, set it as the default and then put an "advanced mode" button somewhere where you can get the unfiltered glorious node editor that I completely do not understand.

Additionally, a minor thing, what you call shape interval is called "spacing" in every other digital painting software out there, I was quite confused when I saw it, additionally the tab that you called "flow" has nothing to do with flow, it's all just spacing things, so that might need some adjustment, it's a pretty minor thing but eh, would be nicer if you tried to use the same terminology as other programs for things like this.

Hope this helped somehow, plese think of it as feedback.

Also... Still want that linux version >:(