The light table has seen several improvements and has its own Prefs settings, which, makes using the tricky little beast a bit easier
On the tool bar, picking up brushes has been made easier by the inclusion of a Magic Wand icon. Just click the Custom Brush icon three times then click once inside the area you wish to pick up. DPaint grabs hold of all pixels lying contiguous with the one you click on, except background pixels, making it much easier to pick up irregular shapes.
One priceless addition is the ability to animate with a page size larger than the screen, which allows for the new Anim menu option, Camera Moves. This can be put to work to pan the camera across a larger-than-screen image to give the effect of a scrolling background, zoom in or out, and generally give the animator a much enhanced range of effects to play with.
Screen wrap is taken care of, so if you were setting up an anim of a man running, it would be relatively easy to have him jog on the spot while the background scrolls past rather like in the old movie studios. This takes a lot of the work out of drawing background frames and is a real bonus.
The Move requester has seen a couple of enhancements in that users can now set transparency levels for the beginning and end of a move, and fade in and out very smoothly. Cinematic fades and camera pans aren't exactly new, but they've never been so easy to utilise from within a paint package and videographers would be advised to give DPaint another look.A second animation plus is the removal of the package's fussiness about palettes. With DPaint V, users can animate with frames of differing palettes (one per frame if you wish), making it a lot less painful to stitch several scenes together. When combined with the ability to animate on huge canvasses, the new features give DPaint a much roomier feel.
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The much improved Move requester now has fade in and fade out with user-adjustments for cinematic effects with brushes. This, combined with full-screen camera moves, gives DPaint a real boost for video work. Click on the image to download a more detailed version
The light table feature has seen several improvements and now has its own Prefs settings. The four layers can be selectively turned on or off and each can be dimmed to exact specifications, which makes using the tricky little beast a bit easier. Printing animations for preview may seem daft, but the new printing features include a Storyboard option to print up to 16 frames on one piece of paper. Many animators will find this a puzzling addition, but storyboards are useful for showing an animation in its rough form or tracking the action in a number of scenes without continually running them on screen.
In drawing terms, little has changed. There's a new soft-edged airbrush option which works with HAM and HAM8 to give users the same control offered by other HAM8 packages, but this is hampered by speed considerations and isn't really suited to EHB or other modes with fewer colours. Those who create a lot of HAM8 images or who would like to edit 24-bit files, even if only to add a bit of text to them, will be glad of the new 24-bit support. DPaint can now hold a buffered 24-bit frame in the background while you display it on screen at anything down to 16 colours and mess around with it. For AGA users, this makes DPaint a much more complete package.
DPaint's rivals offer textured painting and other advances over straightforward painting, and DPaint V's attempt to catch up is the new Media and Textures options. Media can be oil paint, chalk, felt tip, or water colour, and there's a generous selection of different canvas textures.
All in all, a good upgrade with as many new features as enhanced old ones. You could argue that the animation restrictions should have gone with release IV, but the use of style guides, auto-recorded macros, and a fistful of tweaks gives DPaint a better chance against the fierce competition.