Nice! Those are definitely tools that should be a standard part of a drawing package.
Blacklisted
"I'AM SATANS FAVORITE CHILD!!"
Indeed they should. Its one of those things (making the grids) that is honestly just busywork. Its not hard, but very time and space consuming. Something like this that allows me to get to where I'm actually doing my art faster is, IMO, exactly what these tools should be for.
They also added a bristle brush into Illustrator CS5, so its more possible to get traditional-looking vector art. I haven't played with that quite yet. I'm all distracted by the perspective tools!
Heck, that perspective grid sounds like something even I want. Anything to make doing perspective work faster is good to me.
http://www.virtueverse.net/wiki/Massacre_Melanie -the original Fire/Dark Corruptor -
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=115217
The Guide to BURN
Its really nice. You can pre-set the specs you want (the angle, how many points, how far back to view, the height of your horizon line, etc.), but its also really easy to manipulate and adjust once its laid down.
I'm able to change the vanishing points, move around the horizon line and viewing angle, move the whole thing so its situated how I need it on my art board, and change the colors of the grids so its easy to see what line is what. You can then also have the other drawing tools snap to the grid, so you can make your vector objects in the perspective that you've set up.
This is a darn nice addition to Illustrator. I'm glad I spent the extra $100 to get the Design Standard package over just upgrading my Photoshop (which had been at CS2... so that was a HUGE change). Its handy having the Holy Trinity all in the same version... with such nice new features =)
I'm loving mine... offhand Wassy, do you know how to reset the stroke points in Illustrator to less than 1 pt. Mine used to read the .75, .5, and .25, but I must have touched something and they're gone now. I can type in those points, but it's a pain to the work flow...
Not sure, as I know down to .25 is in the default. It might have something to do with the brush you have selected, as I know I've seen the partial settings disappear from the pull-down before when working on a class project.... but that was over a year ago and I can't remember specifically what I would have been working on at the time.
EDIT: Oh, you know what? Is this a brush you might have made yourself with doing the point size and angle and auto-correct and all that? With THOSE it might not have the partial point options as default. When I'm using my range of those brushes, each brush is its own size, because the point size is in relation to the auto-correct setting. Changing only the point size and not the auto-correct would change how the auto-correct works.
So, I finally got around to poking around in Illustrator CS5 since I upgraded a few weeks back (been mostly playing around in Photoshop).
Specifically, I poked around the new perspective drawing tools.
*hyperventilates*
This... will save.... so much TIME. And table space! The biggest thing keeping me from drawing proper perspective grids to do environments is that I just plain don't have the dagum room. I did a 2-point perspective steampunk chess set for class once, and had to shove three drafting tables together to do it.
But now..... ooooooooh..... now I can just print the final grid to the specs I want out (gotta overlay the grid with some printable lines, but that also worked better as I only got what I needed) and throw some overlay paper on that and go to town plotting out whatever sort of environment I'm drawing!
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