Monday, January 13, 2014

UPDATED! APP REVIEW: Autodesk Sketchbook Ink on the Toshiba Excite Write Tablet

Autodesk Sketchbook Ink


 This is a resolution-independent drawing tool useful more for final or print-quality artwork (it can output very high resolution images). When you zoom in, there is no rasterization as each stroke is re-rendered to the scale at which it is displayed. Although you cannot infinitely scale down to make micrometer-sized strokes (there is a minimum size) you will be able to create very fine details, including pointillism and crosshatching. Sketch your drawing frames in SketchBook and import into Ink to create final artwork.

UPDATE (Jan 18, 2014): unfortunately, I had to drop the score down to two stars; although the tool is an excellent one, after much drawing with it, I discovered some performance issues (which weren't showstoppers) but there were a couple of crashes and I lost about 20 minute's worth of drawing work. If it happens to me again, I will lower my score further and warn against purchasing this software (unfortunately, as I love it otherwise!



You will find some slight performance hiccups now and then when the screen redraws itself, but I experienced this with other devices as well so I wouldn't see this as a Toshiba-only issue. The computations are pretty extensive to perform so zooming into a heavily cross-hatched illustration will understandably (but only occasionally) need to reset itself if there is a cache conflict. No big deal and liveable.

Drawing is a fluid process, although careful selection of brush min and max and shape will yield best results if you are using pressure to vary line thickness.

Output to higher resolutions can take some time to perform -- don't worry, it hasn't crashed, it's number-crunching your art.

If there were more functions and tools available, as well as more precise tools (such as bezier curves) I would rate it higher. We'll see if subsequent versions get feature additions.