Manga Studio Speaketh, I Listeneth
Mark Leitch, Vice President and GM of Smith Micro, emailed me to say that Manga Studio 4.0 for Windows is indeed progressing towards a stateside release. Furthermore, a beta version was debuted at the NY Comicon last week. Perhaps more importantly to the existing Manga Studio 3.0 user base, a fix for Leopard is forthcoming.
In the meantime, I’ll be doing most of my linework in Painter X. I have a ways to go before finding a brush that mimics the Manga Studio offering closely, but at least the full color painting tools are swell to noodle with. If only Painter could handle 1200 dpi files half as well!
I appreciate that Mark took the time to contact me. It was swell of him.
Posted April 24th, 2008 in Illustration.
Apr 24th, 2008 #
And yet, there’s no official word about Manga Studio on the Content Paradise Manga Studio forum.
sigh.
Apr 24th, 2008 #
before you go back to manga studio. could you go over some of what you think are the finer points of PAINTER X?
thanks, this is an amazing blog! -d!
Apr 24th, 2008 #
Well, I’m not surprised that they contacted you rather than post on the forums, for one I don’t think they monitor the forums. If they did, surely they would have posted something to quell the growing resentment and secondly you have been a one man sales team for MS - at least as far as linework goes. I don’t think there is another site that features MS art and videos as much as yours does.
Apr 24th, 2008 #
Thanks, Mukinese. That’s awesome to hear.
D!, I will try and feature the finer points as I find them. It’s been a long while since I used Painter.
Mike, I’m thinking Mukinese is right - the forum isn’t a place they’re dipping into as of yet, it seems.
Apr 25th, 2008 #
schweet …
Apr 25th, 2008 #
Yo Ray, I don’t know if you’re familiar at all with a program called Drawplus,by Serif Software, but it does offer customizable brushes that might be comparable to MS. The link info below should take you to an overview of how to work with its brush engine walk you through its customizable features.It is a vector program so it’s resolution independent, that is;of course, until you start rasterizining the lineart.
I’m mentioning this as an alternative, not so much as a solution to your delima.
Buena Suerte.
http://www.serif.com/community/tutorials/drawplus/dp8/use-the-natural-media-brushes.PDF
Apr 25th, 2008 #
Good for getting a response out of Smith, Ray. Keep the pressure on ‘em. I personally bought a copy of Manga Studio EX based on your recommendation and agree about the line quality being second to none, but virtually everything else being a non-intuitive nightmare when integrating it into a production pipeline.
Apr 25th, 2008 #
I have to say, SM has been very great with me. I’m excited to see MS4 come out now that we know things are cooking with gas. I, much like all of you, was just getting antsy waiting for some word.
GC, MS and I just clicked. It’s one of the few apps where everything makes sense to me. That is why I have had an on again, off again relationship with it post-Leopard/Vista. I just can’t put it down.
Mez, that PDF looks downright exciting. I’m checking out the app now.
Apr 26th, 2008 #
I’m also liking the look of MS4, I always liked the line tools they work very well and all the options available mean you can customise them to fit the way you work. I’ve been playing with the Japanese demo of MS4 (Comicstudio 4) and you can now have full colour layers and a proper airbrush! There are lots of new tools and functions - all with the plethora of options that MS piles on top, so I’m pretty sure that MS 4 will probably cover a good 90% of my production needs. Can’t wait to get my hands on the English language version.
Apr 26th, 2008 #
Ray, I just discovered this through a link on Flickr.com…
I’m going to create a gallery of my work, and I think almost any artist here would love to do the same. Look into it. I see no downside so far.
http://www.imagekind.com
Apr 27th, 2008 #
If you’re interested in seeing an example…
http://www.imagekind.com/GalleryProfile.aspx?gid=80e96a9b-15cb-4728-baf8-0a41c43eccc3
Apr 27th, 2008 #
GC, I’ve been looking for some way to sell prints. INPRNT, Thumbtack Press, something. I even bought my own Ultrachrome, archival, Epson. I think that Imagekind looks like it could be the best of the bunch. Blueflip is a close second.
BTW, REALLY nice.
Do me a favor. Send me an email, wouldya?
May 1st, 2008 #
Hey, Ray. I’ve had some major problems with my external hard drive the past several days… I thought I was going to lose almost 50 GBs of YEARS worth of work…. what a nightmare. Went out and bought a new LaCie d2 500GB external for under $200, which just blows my mind.
May 1st, 2008 #
Oh, and thanks for the “Alligator Wrestling” comment. :)
May 2nd, 2008 #
Smith Micro has released the update to fix Manga Studio on Macs running leopard — it’s on the Smith Micro site, under updates, it’s Manga Studio 3.0.2
Link:
http://my.smithmicro.com/mac/manga/updates.html
Hope this helps.
May 5th, 2008 #
Good call, Mike R.
May 5th, 2008 #
Fortunately for me, I never “upgraded” to Leopard. I think Apple made so many basic mistakes that I decided to stick with 10.4.11 for about a year (should be enough time to work out the bugs).
May 6th, 2008 #
Leopard has run swell for me. I love the features it introduced.
May 10th, 2008 #
So there is an update for MS! It is working for me again. Are you still running painter X or have you gone back to MS?
May 10th, 2008 #
I’m flip-flopping between the two. Until a universal binary comes out for V. 4, I’m still stuck in Windows XP. Arrrgh.
May 21st, 2008 #
It’s nice to see you bringing back the word “swell” too. Welcome aboard the Swell Train, bound for Swellville.
May 21st, 2008 #
I regularly interject neato and keen into regular conversation. Also, using the modifier “highly” before any of the aforementioned words is recommended.