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From: ali@polya.Stanford.EDU (Ali T. Ozer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: DPaint III
Message-ID: <6803@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 11 Feb 89 18:17:26 GMT
Reply-To: aozer@NeXT.com (Ali Ozer)
Organization: .
Lines: 52
References:

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Dan Silva was at FAUG this month (Tuesday, Feb 7), showing DPaint III.

First of all most problems/bugs with DPaint II seem to be fixed:
Font panel is unlimited now, fat-line drawing is faster, you can draw
in overscan (as opposed to having to scroll around), half-bright is supported  
(when you "spread" colors, for instance, and do fills, it will take advantage 
of the half-bright colors if you are in half-bright mode), perspectives are 
faster and more flexible, color-cycling doesn't hog the CPU, etc...

That's all nice, and you expect the above kind of changes. But, DPaint III
is also a totally different beast than DPaint II in one major way --- it's
an ANIM paint program. You can paint using multiple frames, switching back
and forth between frames. (And no, it doesn't use CHIP memory to store all
the frames.) You can either specify "compressed," which lets you have
a great deal more frames in memory, but slows rendering down, or you can
specify "non-compressed," in which case each frame occupies gobs of memory
but rendering is considerably faster. 

You can tell the program to "animate" (go through the frames) while you're
moving your brush around so that the brush will be painted in a different
location in every frame --- voila, instant animation. You can tell the 
brush to move/grow/rotate automatically as the frames are being animated 
for other special effects. You can cut a brush with multiple frames and then 
paint with it. All tools --- airbrush, circles, ovals, polygons,
color cycling, perspective, etc are available when drawing in multiple
frames... You can even apply a stencil to every frame!

The program will save the frames in ANIM format and load ANIM format.
This means it should read in VS3D files just fine --- I assume. (Dan did
mention that the ANIM brushes are not saved in ANIM format.) You
should be able create an ANIM in VS3D, and then edit the file in DPaint III
and add all the little things that was just too damn hard to do with 3D
objects and/or background/foreground static IFF pictures.

The upgrade price is $57 + cover of DPaint II manual if you bought DPaint II
before Dec 1, 1988, or $27 + cover of DPaint II manual if you bought it
later than that date. Available end of March. And of course, not
copy protected.

I should mention that the program did crash once during Dan's somewhat
planned/somewhat random (as he got sidetracked often) demo. It was after
maybe 30-40 minutes of usage, a few minutes after he showed how you could use
color-cycling in the animation. I wonder if the good-old color-cycling
problems are still lurking in the code?

Oh, and, as you might suspect, there's no HAM support. 

Anyway, from what I saw, it's great. Made that FAUG worth going to; I'm
looking forward to getting my hands on it.

Ali Ozer, aozer@NeXT.com