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Portalgraphics just released the english version of openCanvas 4.5. It’s free of charge for anyone who already owns a license to 4.0, which includes me.

I’m a big fan of OC myself (pretty obvious). All of my artwork have been created solely using it. I rarely import any images for touch-ups in Photoshop. That’s why I decided to write this little review.

Compared to the bump from 3.0 to 4.0, this update is a pretty significant one, which is nice concidering I didn’t have to pay for it.

Interface

OC have always had it’s own way of doing things. Whenever I introduced someone to OC I had to explain all the quirks to smoothen the learning curve. The company behind OC is japanese and apparently no one in it speaks proper english. Naturally that means virtually every feature is named slightly different from the defacto standard seen in other imaging tools like Photoshop.

In this version they threw out the old GUI and naming convention. Menu items are named the same as they are in photoshop and they’re also arranged in a similar fashion. The GUI is more consistent and WAY cleaner than in older versions.

Here are two screenshots of the respective versions for comparison:

 

Even though it will require me to break most of my (bad) habits from 4.0 I really think this change was a necessary one.

Events

The event system recieved a well needed touch-up as well. You can finally adjust the speed on a scale (0-5) and you can even step through frame by frame. This used to be a problem for me because the regular speed was waaay too slow and the “Fast” options was simply too fast. Still no way to step backwards in the recording.

In case it isn’t quite obvious what the artist is doing (some actions are visual hard if not impossible to make out) Portalgraphics added a window that displays every action in plain text in case the viewer needs to keep track of the nitty gritty. Not an essential feature, but nice none the less.

Bug?

The only problem I’ve found with it so far is that for some reason the sampling rate of the drawing tools are much worse than in 4.0. There’s not really a good way to explain it so I made this comparison image:

 

 

Both scribbles were drawn the same way and at the same speed. The difference is pretty obvious. The magnitude of the inaccuracies are pretty alarming. I won’t know to which extent this will affect me until I draw something for real.

I found the problem. As default OC4.5 will read the OS coordinates instead of grabbing them directly from the tablet. I don’t really know the specifics of this, but you can turn on the detailed coordinates by clicking the little box in the bottom right corner of the window.