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| Help Assistant |
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When you start up Piranesi 5 for
the first time, you'll immediately notice the
new Help Assistant. This tells you how the current tool you are using operates,
and gives you a few tips on how to use it to best advantage. It changes
automatically each time you select a new tool, and links directly to the full
Piranesi Help
if you want even more information. The Help Assistant is set up for
you
as a thin vertical panel which uses relatively little screen space, though if
you prefer you can change its position or dismiss it entirely.
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| New Tools for Old |
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We've promoted a number of
Piranesi 4 effects to be Tools in their own right. This makes them easier to
find on the Tools toolbar, and if you have the Help Assistant turned on you'll
be given step by step advice on how to use them. So now you have
specialised Tools for:
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Text creation
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Edge detection
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Restore
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Smudge
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Construct
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Filter
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Prior to Piranesi 5, text
creation was an option to the Montage tool, and the others were "Render Actions"
Meanwhile the Piranesi 4 Pen has turned into a
Pencil! Use it and you'll find you can do everything that you could do with the
old Pen tool and more besides - such as creating filled areas and choosing
between single and multiple line operation.
Global and Local Fills have been streamlined
into one tool, with an option you can toggle on and off.
We're confident you'll find the new arrangement
an improvement, but if you should lose track of which tool you're using just take
a look at the cursor - it now looks like a miniature version of the tool. The
cursor shape will also tell you whether you have any Locks active.
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New Toolbar
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| Tool Options |
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Most Tools offer different settings to the user, for example the brush shape
and size. In Piranesi 5, the most common settings for each Tool are now right in
front of you on the Tool Options toolbar. Most of the time you don't need to be bothered by
advanced settings. If you do need them, just click
the "Advanced" button which pops up a palette - which you can combine with other
palettes to reduce the screen space used.
Incidentally, there's a new Colour, Texture and Grain toolbar sitting
alongside the Tool Options, which houses the remaining effect components. Locks
are handled by a new Locks toolbar.
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click to enlarge
Tool Options
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| Working With Styles |
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At the left of the Tool Options toolbar you'll see
a big thumbnail image which gives a constant reminder of the currently selected
Tool. Place your mouse over it and many of the Tools will respond, offering you
options to graphically "tweak" the settings such as brush size or cutout hook
position.
Now try clicking on the down-arrow next
to the thumbnail, and you'll see one of the most useful improvements in Piranesi
5 - up pops your style library as seen by the new Style Selector! Now you
can quickly access your styles without having to lose all the screen space that
the old Style Browser used to occupy. (In Piranesi 5, the Style Browser has been
renamed as the Style Manager and you only need to summon it for administrative
style management functions.)
It gets better! Because the Style
Selector is working on a per-Tool basis, you can choose to have different
categories of your library pre-selected for each different Tool. So if you have
the Brush tool selected, you are taken to predefined Brush styles, whereas if you
have the Cutout tool you will be offered suitable Cutout styles. Similarly you
can ask Piranesi to only show styles which use your currently selected
tool.
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Style Selector
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| Cutouts |
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Cutout
placement is one of the most popular and productive features of Piranesi, and in
response to user requests we've added more new features.
There's a new
Multiple Cutout placement Tool that
places as many cutouts as you like, chosen randomly from a suitable set. Using
it you can quickly populate a shopping area with people, or create a shrubbery
or a forest.
Cutouts can be grouped and moved
together, and there are new
motion blur and silhouetting effects that can be applied to cutouts.
No Piranesi release would be complete without some new cutouts, and indeed
there are 200 new royalty-free cutout images of people, plants, and street
furniture provided as part of the upgrade, plus some new 3D model cutouts.
If that isn't enough for you, we've made it a lot easier for you to take
advantage of all the models out there on the web - you can now import fully
textured SketchUp or 3DS cutouts.
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Motion blur and silhouette
Some of the new cutouts
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| Light Tool |
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There's a new Light tool which
makes it much easier to re-light your scene. Four different types of light (Point,
Spot, Strip and Parallel) can be placed in your scene with the direction and strength
of your choosing.
The Light tool replaces the old
illumination fades, and does everything they did and more.
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| Stamp Tool |
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The new Stamp tool allows you to paint with one or more raster images. You
can use the colours from the raster file, or ask Piranesi to use the raster as
an alpha mask to the current colour.
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Multiple raster images painted with the Stamp tool
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| Automatic Style Recording |
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Ever created just the effect you want but forgotten to save it? Piranesi 5
has an option to record each variation that you use to paint with, then go back
and save or clear later,
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| Vedute |
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Vedute may be Piranesi's unsung hero, but it hasn't been ignored! Vedute 5.0
contains a number of important new features:
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Raster textures are now rendered
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Parts of the model can be exported as 3D cutouts. Using this feature you
can simulate glass by creating cutouts corresponding to transparent surfaces
in the scene, and later loading them into Piranesi with a reduced blend
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Revised Materials dialog box
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EPix files can be created at specified paper size and resolution
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Material definitions can be saved (as .csv files) and re-imported |
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Textures in Vedute
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| Creating the finished article |
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When you're ready to save your image for final processing or to send to your
customer, Piranesi 5 offers you some valuable new options. Exporting direct to Photoshop PSD files is now
provided, with options to create layers from
materials or cutouts. Piranesi also offers colour management facilities, so that the colours you
see on your output device and those you saw on the screen are as close as
possible.
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| Plus much more... |
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Piranesi 5 contains more enhancements than we have
space to list, but here's a few more:
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The Help information now contains several mini-movies so you can see the
topic in action
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The menu bar can be floated and docked like other toolbars
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InfoTips have been improved especially for the colour picker (try it!)
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New "Check for Updates" command for Piranesi 5 upgrades
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Improved graphic feedback when "tweaking"
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Random size variation in brushes and stamps
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Invert Lock facility to reverse the effect of the active locks (e.g.
paint all surfaces not in a given orientation)
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Multiple material locks can be set with a wildcard
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Separate X and Y repeat control for grains
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New RGB grain based on the restore RGB channel
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New Style grain to vary the grain with each stroke, from those in a
library/category
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Place hook point of a raster texture at the start of the stroke
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Style Manager (the Style Browser as was) has a new Details pane and
additional search facilities
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Improved viewing via better texture mapping and anti-aliasing
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EPix files display thumbnails in Windows Explorer
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URLs can be used to access files (library files, raster files, etc)
directly from web sites
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For more details, download our booklet Introducing Piranesi 5 (PDF 1.5 MB).
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click to view
Example Help movie (on cutout selection)
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