The Great Brush Mystery
July 5th, 2007 by brush
A major problem with sharing Painter brushes with other users is that the associated xml files are not backward compatible with earlier versions. Developments in the brush engine mean that in some cases, an equivalent variant cannot be recreated in an earlier Painter version (RealBristle brush variants for example). In many cases however, it is possible to successfully recreate the variant by manually inputting the brush settings from a screen shot or recipe in a previous version, or by direct editing of the variant xml file.
To this end, I recorded an Apple script in BBEdit which will automatically convert applicable Painter X variant xml files to a format which can be successfully read in all Painter versions from 7 upwards. After using this method to convert custom inking brushes created by Ryan Cole in Painter X, some users reported that the stroke appearance of one of the original variants in Painter X was very different to the equivalent converted variant when used in Painter IX. The converted library may be downloaded here.
My first thought that there was an error in my script, or maybe I had changed the original prior to conversion. There was only one thing for it, I checked the brush settings in the original Painter X version against that of the converted variant in Painter IX. All applicable settings were identical, although there was a small difference in the stroke characteristics; nothing like the difference in the example I had been shown however. It was possible that there were differences between the Mac and Windows versions of the application, but there is one set of variables which could account for the stroke differences - the Brush Tracking preference settings specific to the user. Sure enough, this turned out to be the culprit;
In the above image, the three brush strokes on the left were created in Painter IX using the same variant and brush settings as those on the right. However, the Brush Tracking settings used for the two sets of brush strokes were different;
Brush Tracking settings for the left / right hand strokes;
Velocity Scale: 35.67 / 35.67
Velocity Power: 0.60 / 0.60
Pressure Scale: 0.21 / 0.97
Pressure Power: -3.10 / 1.50