Manga Studio / Clip Studio Paint
I figured it'd be handy to pull discussion about Manga Studio into one place.
I love that MS has pre-built balloon shapes that fall between a mathematical ellipse and a rounded rectangle (something Illustrator cannot comprehend). But is there a way to automatically select "Ellipse C", other than keeping the big Materials window open and pulling it from there, or going thru a bunch of clicky-clicky each time I add some text?
I was overjoyed when I saw the "match text" option, but disappointed when I saw that... it usually doesn't. At least not by western conventions, instead leaving huge amounts of white space, especially at the top and bottom.
The balloon tails are wonderful... except that they don't seem to work if I try to make them using a stylus instead of a mouse... except occasionally it works and I have no idea why.
And undo doesn't work consistently while walking thru any of this.
The balloon-joining is nice, but only after I googled an explanation of how to do it: not very intuitive.
@JasonAQuest - I absolutely love lettering in Manga Studio. The text treatments are fairly limited but it makes up for it in ease of balloon-making. Drag-and-drop tails plus super easy connection of balloons to each other. Love. It.I'm finding it tantalizing. Tantalus (as students of Greek myth will recall) was cursed to have delicious fruit hanging above him, which was withdrawn every time he reached for it.
I love that MS has pre-built balloon shapes that fall between a mathematical ellipse and a rounded rectangle (something Illustrator cannot comprehend). But is there a way to automatically select "Ellipse C", other than keeping the big Materials window open and pulling it from there, or going thru a bunch of clicky-clicky each time I add some text?
I was overjoyed when I saw the "match text" option, but disappointed when I saw that... it usually doesn't. At least not by western conventions, instead leaving huge amounts of white space, especially at the top and bottom.
The balloon tails are wonderful... except that they don't seem to work if I try to make them using a stylus instead of a mouse... except occasionally it works and I have no idea why.
And undo doesn't work consistently while walking thru any of this.
The balloon-joining is nice, but only after I googled an explanation of how to do it: not very intuitive.
Comments
Don't do that too often unless you find a way to name the new balloons, though.
What i don't like about the lettering function is that I can't adjust the letter width. Spacing an all, fine. But no luck so far with the letters themselves. Also, the italics are way too extreme for my taste. I'd like to be able to adjust that. Oh, and I'd like to save more than one default lettering so I can switch baclk and forth more easily.
I think that's it for now.
MangaStudio's typographic controls, however, are just horrible. Absolute deal-breaker for me (I actually walked away from lettering Madefire's digital comics due to their insistence that they be lettered using their proprietary authoring tool which offers less typographic control than Word).
Cheers
Jim
@GregCarter - Joining balloons in AI is actually pretty easy: select the shapes you want joined, go to the Pathfinder tab, and click on the "add to shape area" button (the first one). You can still manipulate the individual components of the compound shape using the white-arrow tool.
I don't want to de-rail this thread any further -- Manga Studio is a great package and it needs a dedicated discussion -- but I will just direct anyone wanting to letter in Illustrator, or thinking of doing so, to the following tutorial pages on my blog:
1: Preparing Your Script
2: Setting Up Your Document
3: Setting Type
4: Basic Balloons & Captions
5: Non-Standard Balloons
6: Sound Effects
If anyone wants any further expansion on those, rather than drive this thread further off-topic, please feel free to use the comments section of the relevant blog entry, or start a thread here. The mere mention of lettering is usually enough to summon me.
Cheers
Jim
Doesn't appear to be discounted on the UK site, however.
Manga Studio EX4 will be on sale for only $29.99 this Friday from Smith Micro. That's 90 PERCENT OFF. If you're not subscribed to their email newsletter, you might want to do it now.
Sign up here: http://my.smithmicro.com/deals/email_list.html
Then again, I'm a sucker, and have bought every useful piece of SM software that goes on sale, and haven't opened half of them. No wonder my computer is so slow!
The 'snap to perspective ruler' feature of EX would probably be worth a couple of hundred bucks on its own. I know every fucker just builds their backgrounds in SketchUp these days, but I like drawing a nice two- and three-point perspective and this takes a lot of the grind out of doing it.
But for inking, in particular, it comes closest to pen-and-paper of any of the things I've tried (Photoshop, Illustrator, Painter).
If I had to give a 100-foot overview of it, I'd say it's like Photoshop with the non-drawing features stripped out, but also capable of handling multipage documents.