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Digital painting setups

This discussion started on Vizon's sketch thread. It's about the optimum digital painting setup. Basically the question is what is in your digital painting setup, what would you recommend using, what would you improve, if anything, etc...?

For instance, my setup consists of a Gateway tabletPC, a Belkin Nostromo Speedpad n52, and Photoshop 6. I bought a tabletPC because it was cheaper than a Wacom Cintiq. And I didn't like drawing on a regular tablet. The n51 is so that I can set Photoshop's keyboard command into a small ergonomic input device. The idea is so that there's nothing on the screen but the drawing. It's not a perfect setup because some features in Photoshop can be set to the n52. And the n52 isn't the sturdiest device. And the Gateway is lacking pressure sensitivity, and the display could be a bit better.

For the most part it works for me. I'd like to know what works for you and why.

I use Photoshop CS2 and a 6 by 8 Wacom Intuos. if you're used to PS 6 or below, the interface does to take some getting used to, but I found that once I did, I liked it a lot. I have my tablet on a stand beside my computer chair, and keep the keyboard on my lap, using my left hand for all the keyboard shortcuts while I draw with my right, watching the cursor on the screen, rather than the tablet. I do think this setup does let you switch tools a little faster than reaching over to click on the relevant icon, which makes a big difference is you have to do a lot of switching between tools.

I do indeed switch tools often. Mainly doing a lot of erasing, undoing, redoing, zooming, and panning. The things that slow me down is color selection. As far as I know you can't select or change colors with the keyboard.

The reason I stopped using a keyboard for shortcuts was because the shortcuts were all over the keyboard. The n52 let me consolidate all the commands I use often in a smaller area. It becomes a matter of moving my fingers not my arm.

I have a desktop PC, a Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 (takes up a lot of desk space), an MX 400 mouse, and an Intuos2 6x8. For quick stuff I'll just put the tablet on my lap, leaning it up against the desk so it's at an incline. If I do that for too long I'll get wrist strain from the tablet being too close and arm strain from my left hand being too far away. So, if I'm doing some serious work then I'll extend the feet on the back of the keyboard, and then something to prop up my tablet so it is resting at an incline over the arrow keys and numpad parts of the keyboard. That works out pretty well, even though it is kind of ghetto and it can be a hassle if I need to switch back to Blender and I need the full keyboard and mouse again.

As for software I use Photoshop CS3 in conjunction with Blender, Illustrator, ArtRage, and AutoHotkey for macros. I like using a tablet for drawing but that's about it. If I'm doing any kind of graphic design work, 3D modeling, or anything else, I strongly prefer using the mouse (and with Blender it's essential). So during the course of the day I'll be swapping input devices quite often unless I'm only sketching or only refining a painting. Every other phase usually has at least one of the other programs involved.

I used to have a second monitor and a drawing table, which I had to leave it behind when I moved, planning that I'll be able to replace them both with a Cintiq. A second monitor is a great thing to have to put some notes or references up on.

My set up isn't perfect, and I'm hoping I'll find something that comes close soon. As far as my plans for getting a Cintiq, every time I've seen an artist use one they never used a keyboard with it. They just clicked on the button and menus when necessary. I don't think I could work like that, especially not in Photoshop (ArtRage, yes). So I'll have to see what works when I get there. But I do want to have access to a full set of keys, at least for typing in names for layers, file names, and the occasional text message. For that I might decide to get one of those laptop sized keyboards, because my ergonomic keyboard can't possibly share enough space for a Cintiq on here. And because the Cintiq is on a stand I probably won't have room for the mini keyboard either.

I could try a split keyboard and have it on either side of the Cintiq. That would be awesome. Wow, actually that would be REALLY awesome. Hmmm. :)

For the color correction thing there is a solution, and it involves AutoHotkey: http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=76315#td_post_1004880 Basically with it you can create your own shortcut for the color picker, provided that your Photoshop window will stay in the same place.

Yeah, AutoHotkey is a seriously cool program. My favorite use for it is being able to enter in high-bit characters without having to type something like in Alt-Numpad1051 for an em dash. Being a graphic designer, seeing "--" for an em dash in print drives me nuts, and there's no easy way to enter it in using Windows, as opposed to the OSX shortcuts.

The color picking thing doesn't bother me too much because I have a palette layer that I use to eyedropper tool for, and I make custom swatches based off of a color study. In short you turn the image into to use a 128 indexed palette, save the color table, and then import it in as swatches. It's also a great way to kife another artist's or photographer's color scheme :).

It doesn't have to be limited to a 128 palette either. That's just about how many swatches the panel can hold with it's default size. I might do a 256 palette if I have a full range of colors, like shown here.

Oh, and read the rest of the thread that I linked to; they start talking about how to create your own Photoshop scripts to incrementally adjust the Hue, saturation, and Brightness which you can then assign shortcuts too. That's a nice way to do small adjustments without having to even open the color picker.

Thanks a mil!!! AutoHotkey looks like something I going to spend a day with learning and tweaking, it's right up my alley.

I wonder if it's possible to map color setting to a device that has a row of sliders, something like a USB/MIDI mixing board. I've been thinking about the idea of picking a color by moving 3 or 4 slicers assigned with RGB, or CMYB. It's crazy, but I want to try that.

If I ever made it big or hit the lotto or something, I would definitely buy the biggest Cintiq I can find. And still use the n52. Desk space isn't an a problem for me.

I haven't really use any other programs other than Photoshop. I try to get into Painter but it's over my head. And Gimp, even more so. I'm about to look into ArtRage now. I also use a cheap little bargin bin vector program called CompuWorks Draw, it gets the job done. I've seen some really crazy realism stuff done in Illustrator. Makes me wonder, why isn't there an Adobe Illustrator Elements?

Your best bet would be to use a joystick. Apparently they do have joysticks with a z-axis as well. AutoHotkey can remap the joystick to keyboard shortcuts and vise versa, so then you can activate Photoshop scripts using the joystick. But now we are just getting into multiple devices, which probably isn't what you want :). As for sliders, they already have those in the color panel anyway, and I usually keep it on CMYK because it feels more like using paints.

Painter is good at simulating natural mediums but you don't have the same freedoms when it comes to making your own brushes. I use ArtRage as a poor man's Painter, because the oil painting effects is what I wanted, and ArtRage does that really well. Plus I love the interface. I'm a big supporter of open source software, but The GIMP has been developing really really slowly and their community is a bit snobby. As for why I don't use it for drawing, their brush system is really basic (although the animated brushes are cool). Seriously, that's about it. Yeah, I get told all the time that it can import Photoshop brushes, but it only adapts the few settings it does support and everything else is lost. But in it's defense, depending on your style The GIMP will do the job just fine, and I've seen some amazing work done with it. So it's not that it's a bad program, just that I'd have to change my style if I used it. Inkscape on the other hand rocks for vector art, and I'll be using it for some bigger projects in the future.

When I say sliders I meant something like this:

If I could set one for, say, cyan, one for magenta, yellow and black, I could bring up a color by changing the positions. This would work if Photoshop allowed you to change the CMYB values independently and at the same time. Like I said, desk space isn't an issue. I would use multiple devices, if they were the right ones. The only thing on my desk now is just junk food wrapings and old sketches.

The one thing I did read about Gimp was that it had support for MIDI devices like mixers, keyboard and other gizmos. But only in the Linux version.

Man, I've just got too many gadgets on my brain right now.

I'm looking in to Inkscapes. Pretty cool for open source.

Just noticed you use Blender. Do you do 3D? That's something I've wanted to get into, but if Gimp is over my head, Blender is on another planet. I'm not a big fan of Final Fantasy, but I like that 3D art style. But to do that level of 3D takes years of experience.

I knew what you meant by sliders. I actually used to do music before I started getting into visual arts, so I've messed around with tons of MIDI controllers and seen people use them in unorthodox ways. I'm just saying that the sliders on the screen would probably be just as easy as having to move your hand away from the screen or n52/keyboard. And Linux does give you easy access to devices, so it doesn't surprise me that the MIDI for GIMP is Linux only. I don't know how much of a benefit you'll get from a hardware interface like that for illustrating, not to mention getting it to work with Photoshop. Since it's an analog device, you'll need to send a specific value to the Photoshop script for it to work properly, and I don't know if it's possible for Photoshop to receive input from external programs. Any other option would involve making a plugin for Photoshop.

Yes. I do 3D. For the most part I've used it for motion graphics and a few simple animations. I started doing it before getting into illustration, so I use Blender a lot to cheat on things like perspective, machines, architecture, etc. One of the other guys on our team has become quite good with the software so he's surpassed in Blender knowledge, which was funny because I was the one that originally taught him. And yes, it does take a long time, even longer if you plan on being able to do the whole process on your own. So the two of us started to specialize. He loves the rigging, modeling, and animating part of it; I love the concept art, modeling, texturing, lighting, and animating part of it (as soon as I learn the changes in the new animation tools). That's been really helpful because now I don't have to know how to do everything.

I taught Blender workshops at my college for 2 years, and from what I seen from students I can say that it's actually not that difficult to learn. The Gimp might be over your head because it's just different than Photoshop, and has a lot of design philosophies that deviate from most other programs. Blender is the same way. The software isn't complex, there's just a LOT of simple tools that you need to know how to use. Everything else is just theory, and that's the part that isn't covered very well in many tutorials. I'm working with some guys that are putting together a great site that teaches the theory in a way that makes sense, followed by how to do what you learned in multiple 3D programs. It might be another month or so until it's up since The guy that's running the project is off working on another CG film, but I'll announce it here when it goes live. To be honest I'm tired of places like The Gnomon Workshop and Animation Mentor that are established by the industry so there are more skilled people to hire, but they make the courses cost an arm and a leg, and they are still having a hard time trying to find more talent. Knowing how to use a 3D program can be such a lifesaver sometimes, and it should be free to learn how to do it.

The good news is that in order to be a good 3D artist you have to be a good 2D artist first. So you've got the hardest part down already. That's were I saw students struggle with the most; the ones that were not artists (that includes the computer science majors) had a much harder time grasping the software than those that were. So it's still about the art and not so much about the technical sides of 3D rendering. The rest is just adding another dimension to what you already know.

And as a side note, Blender now have improved fur simulation, but that feature is actually quite complex. :) Luckily the Big Buck Bunny production files are Creative Commons so you can download them and see how they pulled it of.

One of the reasons I chose to focus on realistic drawing was because I wanted move to 3D graphics eventually. I try to imagine my characters in 3D and try to light a scene as if the light was there. Years ago I stumbled on to a program called trueSpace. It was a simple program at the time, simple enough for me to grasp the concepts of working in 3D space. The fact that it was only a demo version and that I could only use it at work, (I didn't own a computer then) I didn't pursue it further and stuck with 2D art.

I imagine the leap it takes to go from still rendering to animation isn't as far as it is in hand drawn animation. I mean, if I can create a charcter in 3D, would it be too difficult to animate it?

Well, there's some things that are easier to do in 3D, but there are still things that are easier to do in 2D. Creating the mesh, texturing/shading, and rigging is it's own animal and 2D animation has no equivalent. So that's some extra work you have to do in 3D but not in 2D. Posing is more difficult in 3D than in 2D, and that in turn makes timing take longer. I believe that inbetweening for 3D is no different than in 2D, in that every frame the character has to be carefully posed or the animation won't look perfect. It may be easier to visualize what needs to be done next with your 3D software interpolating between the few keyframes you've already put in, but in the end you usually have to go down to a frame-by-frame level unless there's not a lot of movement. This of course applies to high-quality animation. You can spend less time and have slightly clunkier animation in 3D but at least it'll still be 30 fps, unlike 2D when you start saving man hours by animating on twos or threes (skipping frames). So that's the benefit and curse of 3D; it'll be full fps but the animation just won't look natural, as opposed to 2D where we can excuse some clunky animation (e.g. anime). Because of that I don't think the uncanny valley applies to 2D animation, which is a good thing.

Rendering in 2D takes a ton of man hours, and you have to make sure each drawing is on model, clean, and shaded by hand. This is not a problem in 3D. You just have to make sure the lighting is correct, do a few test renders, and then wait for a day (or more) while the computer renders the shot you just finished. All that time you spent modeling, texturing, and rigging pays off here.

Some 3D animators, especially those that were wise and got trained in 2D animation as well, will do a pencil test of the animation first, only drawing a very simple version of the character, usually a a stick figure. When that animation is approved by the director, they'll import the movie file into their 3D software and match the pose frame by frame as it appears on the pencil test. Posing a 3D character can be time consuming, and sometimes very tricky depending on how intuitive of a rig you are using, so you don't want to be spending time manipulating the rig while you are trying to figure out things like timing and dynamic poses. All the 2D animation principles apply to 3D, so if you got the animation down perfect in 2D it's trivial to do it in 3D.

I think of it this way: once you've created a character design you can start bringing the character to life right away with 2D. For 3D you still have more work to do before you can even start animating. Depending on the level of detail you want the 3D model to have, this phase can take a very long time. Case in point: we've been working off and on (mostly off, now) on a 3D model of a fox to use for one of our pet projects. We are shooting for realism on this character. It's still not done yet. I still need to do finish the texture work and he still needs to finish the fur setup (not an easy task, especially after we realized that the reason why the fur wasn't looking right was because it was lacking an undercoat). Not counting all the research done and revisions we've made to the model, I think we've spent over a hundred hours on the model so far, and we have about another hundred more to go. And this is for a series of self-promotional 30 second skits, that have already been written and recorded over a year ago. Had we decided to do a 2D animated cartoon, we'd be done already, and they would have been just as funny

On the other hand, an animated board piece character for a TV ad only took me an an hour to model and rig. We started animating that day. And guess what, that project actually got done :D.

All we really want to do is to tell stories. We've started to hold off on the complex 3D stuff so we can start working on projects that we can actually finish with what we have and in a timely manner, like 2D animation, web comics (I never thought I'd be working on one of those), and simple 3D animations. The amazing 3D stuff we want to do in the future just isn't going to happen until we've become superhuman artists or have a studio of 30 or more people. Not to say it's not possible; there are superhuman artists with a lot of time that create their own amazing 3D animated shorts, or people who animate their own feature length 2D movies like "Romeo and Juliet: Sealed with a Kiss" or "Elysian Tail", which isn't done yet (I wonder when Dean is going to finish that one).

Anyway, I'd say keep your focus on 2D art and start learning 2D animation so by the time you are good at it 3D animation will be a walk in the park. Learning 2D animation is also good because is forces you to be come a better artist quite quickly. Slowly start learning 3D because that world changes a lot and some techniques or pieces of software become obsolete, so don't spend too much time getting into the technical details. Create a model, texture it, rig it if you want, maybe some simple animations, but nothing too serious or time consuming. 3D is still good to know because you can utilize it for you paintings and 2D animations to work more quickly.

When I started this thread I wanted to include PDAs as part of a digital painting setup, but I doubt many artists use them. I used a PDA to sketch most of the digital painting that I posted on JaxPad.

Originally I used PalmOS based devices like the (now defunct) Sony Clie and later a Palm TX. I used two programs, Hand Painter, and TealPaint. Both programs are MSPaint level, but you can do some impressive stuff in MSPaint, especially when you can draw on the screen. What made these programs cooler was the fact that you can reprogram the buttons to switch to different art tools. That simple concept got me on the path of using the SpeedPad n52.

My last PDA was a Dell Axim 51v. I liked it for the features, VGA screen, 650mhz CPU, WiFi, etc... But the interface was just bad. The only thing that stopped me from smashing it against a brick wall was a program called PocketArtist. It's the closest thing to Photoshop on a PDA.

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I use Photoshop CS2 but I'm upgrading to CS3 today (hoooyeah!) Something that really bothers me is that for some reason CS2 (I don't know if this happens in CS3) whatever colors show up in Photoshop, everything becomes a lot more washed out when I upload that same image to the web. I heard this is a common problem (I don't know if OS matters, I'm on a Mac OSX).

But yeah I use Photoshop and ArtRage for the most part. I have an Intuous 3 tablet that has shortcut keys and a zoom slider directly on the tablet, which I gotta say, is waaaay cool and I'd highly recommend this tablet to anyone who's tired of leaning forward and fiddling with their keyboard for shortcuts.

About the Intuos3, if I'm not mistaken has 8 programmable buttons, and two vertical touch pads. Do you find that it has enough buttons for the shortcuts you use or does it seen like you need more buttons? I use my Speedpad in a similar manner but I try to map every function that I might possibly use on to it. The idea, for me, is to not have to stop drawing when I need to switch tools. What do you program your buttons to do?

I think its enough buttons for the shortcuts I tend to use, but I think the 2 sliders are kind of annoying. I turned one of them off because my hand kept grazing it and zooming in/out of my picture while i'm working on it.

Well, it does have 8 buttons but you really only use half of them. The two sets of buttons are there for both left and right handed people. And yes, when I use the Intuos3 I turned the sliders off too.

I still prefer to use the keyboard for shortcuts, but then again I use an Intuos2 at home and it's buttonless. So, I guess I was just raised that way :).