New Directional Rainbow Brush; Smear Effect; EasyPainter Out of Beta and Becomes Fantasia!

Yes! A lot of announcements today:

The new Fantasia Painter is here: http://fantasia.nokola.com

1. New Rainbow brush makes ultra cool smooth color transitions, based on stroke direction
2. EasyPainter includes all Fantasia brushes and is now named Fantasia!
3. Fantasia is out of Beta! There is new, enhanced Undo functionality, improved interface.
4. Smear procedural brush effect makes for reallistic paint “feel” when drawing

Details below:

Rainbow Brush

The rainbow brush changes color based on stroke direction. It cycles through the color wheel.

Here’s a sample:

Try making strokes multiple strokes from left-to-right, then from top-to-down, then from right-to-left to see how it feels :)

Fantasia Lite + EasyPainter = Love (= Fantasia Painter)

EasyPainter has all brushes, is out of beta and has an undo stack that is limited to 400 MB and captures undo data every second, if there is a change.

This allows even a mid-stroke undo capturing – a must have for nice experience with the new brushes.

I had this brush improvement in mind probably for the last 5-6 months. It’s nice to finally see it done.

Also, there is a small, but significant UI improvement – some extra margins are removes and a little bit of space is added between some controls. This makes the whole program easier to read. The background behind the image is a little darker too, to “give out the color” some more.

Smear Effect

All of the History procedural brushes (Sketch, Furs, Rainbow), now include “Smear mode”, which looks like this:

Notice how the “Smear on” paint has some darker regions, and generally it looks and behaves like real paint. The “Smear off” paint is smooth, and generally looks more “sketchy”. I believe both painting modes have their use.

The smear is easily controlled from within Fantasia:

Technical details: The Smear effect is produced by varying the opacity slightly (e.g. from 243 to 255), and then drawing on black background. It’s not exactly random – I’m using a computation (truncation) “issue” with pre-multiplied alpha. When you draw low-opacity (< 20) object in Silverlight multiple times (e.g. 25 times), the alpha sometimes “magically transfers” making the image with less than 255 opacity. In short, the image can get corrupted due to rounding errors. I’m using this corruption to achieve the Smear effect. In a “perfect world” (where all computations are double and alphas are not premultiplied), you can achieve the same effect by lowering the destination alpha by 2 or so every time you draw a pixel with opacity < 10.

Last but not least: here’s a rabbit made by Burcu with Fantasia. Burcu is one of my new colleagues.

That’s all! Needless to say, I’m happy with Fantasia now.

Hope you like it too! Please comment!