I’m looking for a freeware, shareware or moderately priced Windows program that can draw line art and has the ability to do alpha channels. Something like Microsoft paint but with more tools and is more precision. I want to use this program to draw UV maps and inpor them into Blender. I’ve found that the Gimp is not very friendly to draw line art.
Any suggestions would be great. Thanks.
I don’t know what you have against GIMP, but maybe this is what you want:
http://www.getpaint.net/
(Just so you know, to draw lines in gimp, hold down shift.)
Inkscape is good at line art, and you can use IrfanView to add alpha channels by converting to PNG.
@egan: Thanks for the link. GetPaint looks awsome! I use the Gimp all the time for photo editing, etc… I find that for drawing, the GIMP is awkward. I know about the shift key but it’s still not very precise. Drawing precision cicles and placing them exactly where you need them is a bit awkward too. Maybe it’s just me. I’ll have to take a look at Getpaint, it looks great.
@Orinoco: Inkscape looks great too. I’ll have to try it out tonight. Thanks.
Other nifty bitmap apps: artweaver and artrage (“starter edition” is free.)
For more precision maybe a CAD app?
Yes, probably it’s “just you”…
To draw circles at a precise place use two “guide lines” to make a cross hair
Then with snap/on use the “circle selection” tool , click over the cross hair center, press Ctrl key to start from the center and Shift to get a circle shape.
OTO,
Thanks the suggestion. Best I can tell, this only gets you a “circle selection” at precise location, not an actual drawn circle. To draw the actual circle I then had to add a border and then fill it. The centerline of the circumference is then a caluclation of the inner and outer walls of the border, etc… This is what I meant by “too awkward”. Do you know of another way in GIMP?
I’m thinking that I need to find a free CAD program as suggested by mzungu.
I guess that you’re a bit lost/confused…
well here’s a nice free CAD soft:
http://www.ribbonsoft.com/qcad.html
Thanks OTO. That CAD program looks like it would be perfect.
This is the GIMP “Draw Circle” method that I was describing.:
This community is so friendly and helpful. Thanks!
Check out www.artweaver.de and http://www.portalgraphics.net/en/ (OpenCanvas). 1.x version of OpenCanvas is freely available.
You can get Paint Shop Pro 10 at a reasonable price (I have PSP 7)
OMG at the GIMP circle creating tutorial, they need a draw shape tool like my version of PSP.
The “community edition” is source-code only and only for Linux/*nix. If you’re on windows, some other free options include:
Alibre Design Xpress (3D), UGS Solid Edge 2D (must register, but very good), ProgeCAD Smart! (2008 version recently released), DESI-III, or MINOS (3D, I’ve not tried this one personally)
Hi,
That’s the hard way of doing it! The easy way is to stroke your selection. Just select a circle, then Edit>Stroke Selection…. You can stroke it using any of your normal paint tools (paintbrush, airbrush, eraser, etc.). This also works with complex selections and you can stroke paths too.
Would love to know of a great 2d Paint Program that runs on Linux all these alternatives to gimp and photoshop are very cool but mainly windows based.
Anyone know of a good OSS image editor other than the gimp that runs on Linux??
gimp has a way to draw SVG circles too:
Filters> Render> Gfig…
now you have all the autocad draw tools for circles, squares and line… they are SVG, so you can move things around very easy, and edit the bezier nodes.
Have fun 
My Linux distro (Sabayon) came with a paint program called Krita 1.6.1. It does circles well. I haven’t used it, since I mainly use Gimp and Inkscape. Krita looks like it’s got some Gimp-like features (layers, filters) and some Inkscape features (vector drawing, bezier curves) along with some basic paint and image manipulation features.
I use photoshop elements 4.0… which is also recommended in blender tutorials, so even though I don’t even know what it is I know it works with UV mapping due to these tutorials. I have no idea what the price is for PC’s, but it’s certainly worth it I’d recommend photoshop any day.
Coincidentally, just today I saw Photoshop Elements 4/Adobe Premier Elements bundle on the clearance rack for $59.00US. The latest version is Photoshop Elements 6/ Adobe Premier Elements bundle , which sells for $149US. I guess that is a pretty good deal.
God’s telling ya something