Some feedback and suggestions

Hey there,

Overall, I'm super excited about Verve, esp. your approach on getting rid of the UI while painting and using local widgets to adjust parameters.

I collected a couple of notes during my first experience. Not sure where to put them, so I just dump them here:

1. I need a flat brush that reacts to pen-tilt only (completely ignores the brush stroke direction). Right now, it's almost impossible for me to draw anything precisely, which leave me at doodling. The brush 7 is rotated correctly on touch-down, but than starts to rotate into the brush stroke direction, which might be a good thing for users without tablet, but takes away control from me.
2. The local modifiers knobs e.g. for "Fluidity" should be opened directly under the mouse and have a small label with their name and value.
3. I personally find the knobs with the points terribly hard to read. I would prefer arcs, but that's a personal taste thing.
4. I find too hard to scrape away all color from a layer (I have to brush several times over to get rid of all the color).
5. The quick-mask should not only affect fluids but also build-up.
6. There should be a quick way of inverting the quick mask.
7. Warp didn't work for me (MacBook-Pro retina with Win7).
8. The Brightness/Opacity-Ramps are too narrow and too hard to hit.
9. I would love to switch between a couple of colors with hotkeys (light, shadow, gray).
10. I would love to have a quick switch for opacity and brightness, similar to the brush-size. I image something like: a.) hold down and keep pressing "o" -> knob appears directly under mouse, b.) move mouse left/right up down to adjust parameter, c.) release mouse-> knob disappears, values is set. Pressing and releasing the "o"-key toggles the knob-visibility.

11. My Photoshop-Setup during painting has the following brushes:
a. Hard pen, size controlled by pen-pressure, opacity controlled by hotkeys or widget.
b. Soft pen, opacity controlled by pen-pressure, size controlled by hotkeys and widget.
c. Soft pen for smudging, (opacity<-pressure)
d. Large flat pen with hard edges (similar to brush 7), (opacity,size<-pressure, orientation<-pen tilt)
e. Point-Splatter (similar to brush 3)
f. Large pen for adding rough structures (similar to pen 8) (opacity<-pressure, orientation<-pen tilt)

I quickly need to switch between these via hotkeys. That's why I believe that fluidity, build-up, opacity, pen-pressure and pen-size should be part of the these brush presets. Otherwise I'm constantly reverting valuable settings I made to other brushes.

Some of these ramblings are probably double postings.

Otherwise I would say: you're at 90% of building my favorite paint program.

Thanks for your great work.
/tom

[Taron]

Woho...somebody jumps right into suggestion flood without having figured out everything yet!

Easy Tom, there are a few things that need some exploring and many that need patience. However, the next version already addresses a bunch of your issues. Most importantly masking! It does all that and more! You'll see...

However, if you want a more brutal eraser now, use brush #2 or #6. Those are strong enough.
Warp always works, except when Fluidity is on 0 and you just try to brush. Then you'd need to smudge and it would work, you'll see. However, if fluidity is up, it should always show effect. Thing with Warp is that it's only acting on motion vectors! With fluidity on 0 a normal brush stroke does not create motion vectors. But I'll "fix" that, too...meant to for a while.

The color management and control will be radically different in the upcoming version!

You can hit eh...[x] to switch between two color slots (imaginary). That's similar to [b] for material Build-up settings. Parameter dials pop up exactly where your brush is at. The same goes for fluidity when you hit [f] and...heck, please, read the docs for a few seconds!

Ohhhh with the next version you can totally go wild with brush settings and will have a great deal of control. BUT THEN you should really, really read the docs for that!
But I'll try to make it as clear as possible in the new GUI.

Thanks for going through it all and I am thrilled about what you'll make with Verve!

Hi Taron,

Wow. You've a very impressive response time. Amazing. Sorry for dumping all this stuff just so. As an small excuse, I can at least claim to have spent some hours exploring and reading the manual thoroughly before posting . At least thoroughly enough so I would have bet that [x] is not mentioned there.

I will play some more with brushes 2 and 6. It would have been nice to have some more description on the different brushes. I found stuff on 3,8,9 in the videos. 2,4,5,6 I couldn't really tell the difference. But then again, it's just me complaining about a free gift.

I will check warp again. The fluidity-Setting might have been the problem indeed.

Regarding [b] - On u33, the build-up setting does not open directly at the cursor, but slightly offset to the lower right, which forces me to move the cursor before adjusting the setting. Same with [f]. I know this is a small thing, but probably easy to adjust, so I thought I point it out.

Again, sorry if I came across bitchy. I really read the manual a couple of times before posting here. I promise If I think the Verve is super promising, I wouldn't have cared to post the stuff. I am really looking forward to the upcoming brush presets. Can't wait to play with that. Thanks in advance.

greets from Berlin,
/tom

[Taron]

AH that's what you mean... you want to just hit the key and turn the dial, rather than having to move over and do that. I think Zafio had the same thought back then. Yeah, I'll see to that!

[x] is not in the docs, because it was just a temporary thing along with a bunch of other stuff that just haven't gone "official", yet, because it's waiting for proper implementation (including [n] and [m] ) But it's coming!
The first video featured brush #2 the most and some #4. The differences there don't matter and won't anymore as the new brush engine will be entirely different and allow you to do anything you want with any brush. The settings will ALL be up to you!
With it will come a proper explanation of it all, too, no worries there ...eh... or only some mild worries, which you should totally let me know about here then, too!

I think, we're already on the right foot together, hehe, so on wards and up from here!

Man, I still have so much work with this...pffff...but it's awesome, too. I wished I could already share with you what I've got going, but I wouldn't want to do that to myself just yet, hahaha. Too many thing will still need their "final" shape in order to stay consistent later on and come to a nice file format we all can rely on.
I foresee a few bumps in the road right now, but we shall see...