4th paint /gimp - free alternative to sai

[Mikan]

I emailed support@4paint.net and Susume said that he'd be willing to sell me a copy if I gave him a cc.. but absolutely no English help will be available.  Hopefully he'll at least help me with a driver issue I'm having with my tabletpc.  Anyway, looking like a good program, it's at least sai's equal for sketching if not coloring and has things like text function which Sai is missing. The only issue I have with it so far is that it looks like it's harder to blend colors in than Sai right now.

[tovan]

Well..

4thpaint is great.

Actually, i just need the custom brush. It's really good. Gimp is good as well, however, I'm not comfortable with its memory management or whacamacalit ~

[figue]

It's a solid program and if you play around you'll be able to blend even better than SAI. It's specially great because you have that Photoshop hard brush which is essential to mix colors (read not blend).

[Mikan]

I've been playing around with it for about a week now, and still can't find a brush/mixer/finger setting that will let me blend as well as I can in Sai.  The mixing tools all seem to pick up clear areas, which in sai, the mixing brush's ignore clear, and will only pick up color, and fill the brush.  This is a major annoyance to me.  Photoshop is the same way, and I really can't stand blending in Photoshop because of this.   In all other ways it's very superior, except I'm having a cursor alignment problem with my widescreen tabletpcs which Susumu is trying to help me with, but not succeeding so far.

I successfully purchased the program.  Susumu emailed the online store and then the store emailed me, and I emailed them my personal info, which they then set up a foreign account for me.  Then I was able to purchase the program with a card..so if anyone is interested and doesn't mind dealing with no English support, it's definitely a superior program.  As much as I love sai, I've been working in it for like 4 years now, 4paint beats it in almost every area at this point.  The major factor is that it allows for much larger canvas's and paintings.  In sai I'm limited to about 4000x3000, before my 4gig memory system starts throwing errors at me, with 4paint I can go up to 8000x6000 easy.

It's somewhat less user friendly with selection and modification/rotation, than Sai is, but again the difference is minor enough that I would still prefer 4paint since 4paint allows me to double the resolution I'm working with.

[figue]

I no longer have 4th paint since the demo ran out long ago and I couldn't save my brushes, I'll try it again and see if I can make some blenders and post screenshots. If you're familiar with Opencanvas it's the same deal but with much more options and control.

[Mikan]

Yeah I was never really able to make good blenders in opencanvas either, but I never really ever got past the sketch stage in opencanvas because it doesn't have a way to modify/skew selections.  Even photoshop beat opencanvas as far as that went.

[figue]

The default brushes are decent enough, check the one highlighted, adjusting the pressure and using a custom dab may help but I don't know if it's even possible to put custom dabs and textures in 4th paint.

[Mikan]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQA4XY8Mb3I

This is an example of the brush and blender I use in sai the most.  You can see that the first brush, when I make an x, that is, when I pick up the brush and start a new stroke, the part which is overpainted by the second stroke doesn't darken, in other words it doesn't create a darkened diamond in the center of the x.  Both 4th paint and Photoshop do this, and I don't know a way to stop them from doing it or why Sai is so much better. With the brush I use in Sai, it's completely dependent on the pressure of the brush.  It makes it much easier to shade a painting and doesn't leave streaks like if you were to do two strokes next to each other there would be a darkened section down the center of the two strokes.   

  With the blender I use, it doesn't recognize clear, it only will take the color that the brush falls on.  With both 4th paint and Photoshop, clear/transparent on the layer is treated like it's another color with the blender, this is completely ridiculous because it tends to make the blenders act as an eraser, and limits the stroke that you can perform to blend, or extend a color with.    It just doesn't look right to me.  I can still sketch stuff out in 4th paint I suppose, but it's much more difficult to finish a painting I'm doing using 4th paint or photoshop tools than sai.

Susumu's a really great guy and really helped me with the cursor problem. 4th paint's cursor now can be completely adjusted for linear correction, which means it should work on almost every tabletpc once you dial in the correction.  That's something that even Sai doesn't really have, it's sometimes hit and miss with what works on a tabletpc with it.  Anyway, I hope he can add something in for the blenders at least if it's not already in there, and maybe I'm missing it, but the blenders(the finger/pallete knife) shouldn't be treating the clear part of a layer as a color.


Anyway I'll try your settings as well, maybe it'll work.  Thanks.

[Mikan]

I managed to kind of figure out how to blend, it's a bit different and more difficult than sai, but managing to get some pretty good effects now. 

  Now I just need to figure out the tone/texture .tns files, how to make them, or where to get them, any hints?

[parfhelbelia]

Hey, I just tried 1.3.0 moment ago and like... OMG

*edited*
Is 1.0.0 translation work with 1.3.0?

[figue]

If you guys can't run NekoPaint try deleting the config folder, it should run. It's always an hassle to get this program running, even with a fresh download (there's no install) from http://www2.tbb.t-com.ne.jp/neko_paint/ it won't run on my system as is.

[Ishtifan]

The link for the translated files is dead -Resurrection  please