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surt
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« Reply #140 on: September 30, 2013, 03:38:29 AM »

Or mouse-wheel up/down or +/- keys or whatever you want to map it to.
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« Reply #141 on: September 30, 2013, 03:40:25 AM »

right i keep forgetting you can map basically everything


everything other than "paste as new layer" for some weird reason
e: actually nope they added that in one of the more recent versions you literally Could Not Do That in the version from like 2007 or whenever
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« Reply #142 on: September 30, 2013, 04:19:28 AM »

Ok, maybe not the best choice of words, but I remember pressing Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V over and over again when I was rearranging my tilesheet. Its just by far the least efficient and slow in comparison to the others I listed. I just tested it to make sure I am not remembering incorrectly. I tried mouse with ctrl, alt, shift, and every combo, with every mouse button, clicking, scrolling, and dragging. The only way to zoom is to use menu, which is by far slowest, or to select zoom tool somehow, and then click to zoom, then reselect your previous tool. That was even hard to type. Maybe menu hotkeys could work for zoom levels or the +/- keys, but when Im using my drawing tablet I dont want to use keyboard. I am not one who will sacrifice 2 seconds everytime I want to zoom, which I like to do a lot as part of how I work. Considering all the other apps obviously focused on improving these exact things, and even Adobe improves these sorts of things in their apps, reducing clicks, and unnecessary mouse dragging, I feel quite justified in my judgement.
« Last Edit: September 30, 2013, 04:27:04 AM by rocknlouie » Logged
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« Reply #143 on: September 30, 2013, 04:24:42 AM »



so your entire complaint is that graphicsgale lets you choose what to set those features as rather than giving you a default input for them
also, for rearranging tilesets you can set a custom grid and select "snap to grid" which you can also set to unique hotkeys

like you're complaining that you have to set things up to get a good workflow is all i'm getting from yr post
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« Reply #144 on: September 30, 2013, 04:28:36 AM »

like it's one thing to point out flaws in a program but it's another thing entirely to just.. not really attempt to use it and then complain that you couldn't use it
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rocknlouie
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« Reply #145 on: September 30, 2013, 04:50:47 AM »

Yeah and its another to only try one program ever, and then just defend it without even reading anything I write. Is everyone on this forum like this?

Even if you change the keys, you still have to press 2 keys and click once just to zoom. Your best bet is to press the +/- keys, but when I am using my drawing tablet, I don't want to use the keyboard. The most efficient thing is either a single modifier key and then scroll, or single modifier and a mouse slide, or the most efficient would be just mouse scroll by itself. I used this program for 2 weeks. Another possible solution would be to bind the mouse scroll wheel to +/-, but hey guess what? you can't do that! I tried that too.

I tried out 25-30 different programs for you, and I wrote up this post. I really tried them, and those programs are just better in specifically that way than Graphics Gale. Graphics Gale is more feature rich than they are. I have a personal issue with inefficiencies like this, I mentioned this in my post, and even linked Graphics Gale, which was mentioned enough times by others anyways. Try the other apps. Stop trying to put me down. I will re-edit my post so it doesn't sound so uptight.
« Last Edit: September 30, 2013, 04:57:15 AM by rocknlouie » Logged
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« Reply #146 on: September 30, 2013, 06:36:09 AM »

I actually started out using Graphics Gale, and was reluctant to use Pro Motion, because a lot of the better features were only available in the pro version. I actually tried almost every single other program before I even tried Pro Motion because of this single reason. I also really did not like the interface of Pro Motion at first, mainly because I had to change a lot of hotkeys, but I am not THAT easilly discouraged, and was able to get it to change everything to how I wanted. Unlike Graphics Gale, which simply won't allow customizations that have been standard for over a decade (I don't get why I can't bind mouse scroll, or why it isn't the default functionality). One of the things I specifically was testing for, was all the possible customizations and configurations I could make.

I actually was using a 3rd party program to bind my mouse scroll wheel to +/-, but I don't feel that Graphics Gale should get any points for that. And by mouse scroll wheel, I really just mean the scrolly thing on my Wacom Tablet. The tablet has an ipod like scroll wheel and a few buttons, and its perfect, because otherwise your left hand is constantly going back and forth between the keyboard and the mouse as your right hand draws. All these little things start to add up, and I bet I can work twice as fast with my tablet in Cosmigo than in Graphics Gale. That is why you buy a drawing tablet, why you lay out your toolbars efficiently and optimize your hotkeys, and why you get the programs that allow the fastest workflow and compatibility with your industry standard tablet.

I got the sense that a lot of the competing programs, many that I didn't even mention, were only started because people realized these inefficiencies, and thought they could do better. Then, of course, they realize it takes a lot of work and don't get anywhere near as finished as Graphics Gale or Cosmigo. The few programs that I did mention, however, were the ones that were pretty darn close to complete, and were also trying to make these exact types of interface improvements to try to win the competition. The efficiency of the interface is a very large part of the focus of many of these apps, so I felt it was a pretty important quality to judge on. The two main qualities I used to judge were interface efficiency and the number/completeness of the tools. Those seemed to be the most important and measurable differences between all of the programs.

The whole point of doing this sort of thing for me was so I could pick the best program before I begin to master it. I don't want to find myself several months down the line, putting up with CTLR+C, CTRL+V over and over, when I wouldn't have had to, had I chosen differently. I don't want to have to find solutions like 3rd party hotkey programs, when I can just avoid the problem altogether by making a different choice in the beginning. I usually hope to find such information provided by others, but sometimes I have to research it myself, and hopefully someone else will get something useful out of my efforts.
« Last Edit: September 30, 2013, 06:43:09 AM by rocknlouie » Logged
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« Reply #147 on: September 30, 2013, 12:22:04 PM »

GraphicsGale has inbuilt key mapping there's no need to use a third party program. Admittedly it is a bit obtuse for mouse wheel: Alt+F11/Alt+F12, but it's there in the manual, or at least it used to be.

I still don't get what the problem with copy-and-paste is. Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V is the accepted standard. If you want to duplicate tiles then just turn on "does not erase image under selection" then it's just click once to select and drag to new position to duplicate.
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« Reply #148 on: October 01, 2013, 01:27:53 AM »

GraphicsGale has inbuilt key mapping there's no need to use a third party program. Admittedly it is a bit obtuse for mouse wheel: Alt+F11/Alt+F12, but it's there in the manual, or at least it used to be.

You are right, it totally works! If you bind ALT+F11 and ALT+F12 to zoom in and out, it treats it as if you had bound the scroll up and down. However, that is extremely unintuitive and is a perfect example of the type of weird quirks you will deal with when using Graphics Gale. My post was about Pro Motion, so I only mentioned a few of my issues with Graphics Gale. Even with that one major inefficiency resolved, the other programs and Pro Motion still have more efficient interfaces overall. Also, Pro Motion still came out on top in almost all the categories, which is why I chose it in the end.

I still don't get what the problem with copy-and-paste is. Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V is the accepted standard. If you want to duplicate tiles then just turn on "does not erase image under selection" then it's just click once to select and drag to new position to duplicate.

For the duplication part, with that method it only duplicates once, and then right click to deselect (or select a dif tool and re-select marquee), then click again to select the tile, and then click and drag to duplicate. OR, you can press CTRL+C, and CTRL+V, and it will create another duplicate, which you can then drag, which is more efficient than the previous method. I just realized you can just press CTRL+V, and it will make a duplicate from the original position, that is the fastest so far. BUT, its still nowhere near as efficient as in several of the other programs, for example in Pro Motion, you can make anything a brush, and then you just click, click, click, one click per copy. In Photoshop you can select an area and then CTRL+ALT drag it over and over with a single click and drag, leaving behind duplicates each time.

And I hope you don't mean CTRL+C/CTRL+V is the accepted standard as in... thats the standard way of copying stuff like text, urls, and files. When I mean industry standard, I mean I tried as many of the programs of the industry that I could find, and found that a majority of them do copying/cloning a certain way, which happens to be the same way that photoshop and many other leading products do it. When specifically talking about the pixel/paint editing program industry standards, it is definitely not by using CTRL+C/CTRL+V. These days it is standard practice to reduce everything to one click, one scroll, one slide, as much as possible. So its not really that there is a problem with copy/paste, but that pressing even just CTRL+V between every click is much less efficient than just clicking once repeatedly. Imagine copy/pasting a paragraph a single word at a time. You might begin to look for a way to just click, click, click, and avoid CTRL+C/CTRL+V every time. It is also no longer acceptable to have to select the zoom tool, then click to zoom, then reselect your old tool. That several click process has been reduced to single actions over a decade ago in interface design.

The interfaces on these other programs are up to date when it comes to efficiency. Graphics Gale's is not. Pro Motion looks very 1995, but it still won in the interface efficiency category, because its not about how it looks, but how long certain tasks take when done perfectly and as quickly as the interface allows. Pro Motion also won hands down with the number of features as well. The only category it didn't win in was learning curve. My process involved figuring out the gamut of features present across all of the available programs, then figuring out major categories to judge them on, then ranking all the programs in each category against each other. Graphics Gale did not come out on top, and it was ranked very low in interface efficiency, even compared to some programs that only had 20% of the features it had.

Graphics Gale is a really great program, it can do way more than many of the other programs, but I cannot pretend that its interface wasn't its biggest turn off. To me its really one of those things where I just wish the developers would fix it, because I really do just want a great tool to use. I really struggled with finding a good one because none of them really had it all. The two with all the functionality (GG/PM) felt very clunky, and then the best of the rest were really focused on interface slickness, but didn't really feel complete. None of them had the best of both in one package. I kept using both Graphics Gale and Pro Motion, because ultimately functionality always wins over slickness. With the other programs, it was more like a selfish desire to try to find one that could replace the clunky tools I was forced to use, but I never found one. With Graphics Gale, the more I learned about the interface, the more shortcomings I uncovered. But with Pro Motion, the more I learned, the more I began to realize how once mastered, it would be extremely efficient. They managed to cram all these features into that program and still get away with single clicking your way through most of it. Graphics Gale's inefficiencies don't even stem from having too many features, but rather from lack of concern for efficiency. Its not like the mouse scroll wheel was already taken, for example, or not like there is any functional reason for why you should need to bind ALT+F11/ALT+F12 to represent the mouse scroll wheel. Not in 2013.
« Last Edit: October 01, 2013, 02:24:20 AM by rocknlouie » Logged
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« Reply #149 on: October 03, 2013, 01:17:51 AM »

thanks so much Blink
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« Reply #150 on: December 03, 2013, 03:16:39 PM »

Train I created during my first #pixelart tutorial which can be found here :



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« Reply #151 on: December 06, 2013, 03:31:13 PM »

It seems I forgot to post this here (it's almost one year old now), but hey:

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« Reply #152 on: January 31, 2014, 10:05:45 AM »

Thanks for this, helped me a great deal just wish you had more :D

It seems I forgot to post this here (it's almost one year old now), but hey:


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« Reply #153 on: January 31, 2014, 03:57:23 PM »

I'm working on a new, concise, general pixel art tutorial just now!

It will be made of short 10s clips, released on giveit100 soon:
giveit100.com/pixelart

There will be slides to go with it, posted on my tumblr, where you can also keep up with WIP from the tutorial:
www.retronator.com

Some sprites from the videos so far:




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« Reply #154 on: February 03, 2014, 08:21:42 AM »

I'm working on a new, concise, general pixel art tutorial just now!

Excellent, thank you.
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« Reply #155 on: April 08, 2014, 01:21:29 PM »

Hello, I need you to save me from insanity! Some time ago I stumbled upon a pixel art tutorial with in-depth analysis of THE EXACT SAME picture from Sword of Mana:



That guy actually draw a grid, cropped individual tiles from the center of the picture and demonstrated the dirt-grass transition tileset of 12 or so tiles.

It was NOT "A Seiken Densetsu 3 Style Guide", and NOT "So You Want To Be A Pixel Artist?". I'm also not sure if it was in English or not.

Please, help me find it! Not like it was brilliant, but it's more like an obsession: I already spent the whole evening chasing the ghosts with every google query I could imagine.
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« Reply #156 on: April 08, 2014, 10:54:57 PM »

Mystery revealed! It was a video tutorial, that's why I couldn't find this by text search. User Batzy from Pixelation forums helped me find it. Sometimes people on the internets are awesome! Smiley



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« Reply #157 on: April 12, 2014, 06:10:22 PM »

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40055.0

awesome index painting totoreal (seriously checck it out)
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« Reply #158 on: October 14, 2014, 07:31:42 AM »

I like my information short and to the point and so I enjoy making reference/cheat sheets. This one is for ISOmetric Pixel Art.
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« Reply #159 on: October 15, 2014, 07:18:17 AM »

Not sure if people'll care that much, but I've done some more tutorials and vids of pixel art being made on my channel. ~  Grin
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