Wacom visited 3D World recently to demo its two new products. First up, is the Wacom Inkling
The new Wacom Inkling
The Wacom Inkling is an ingenious device that enables you to record every stroke you make while sketching and then transfer them to Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator or Autodesk Sketchpad Pro and Sketchpad Designer.
Set-up is a doddle: clip the Inkling receiver to your sketchpad (sizes are limited from A7 to A4), tap the pen nib on the paper to turn it on, and just start sketching.
If you want a different part of the image to reside on a different layer, just press the button on the receiver to start a new one.
When you’ve finished drawing, plug the receiver into your Mac or PC using the bundled USB cable, and then use the Inkling Sketch Manager application to transfer selected layers to your app of choice.
Because the system records pen strokes over time, if you have a complex image that you wish you’d put on different layers, the manager enables you to trim a layer’s recording, a bit like a video edit.
As you move the slider, different strokes are highlighted in a colour depending whether they were done at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of the session.
This way you can split certain parts out and add them to a new layer.
The app also plays back the recording so you can show the image creation process.
A future update will include the ability to export this as an animation file, which we think will offer up all sorts of opportunities for adverts, training or presentations.
A few other things we discovered during the demo was that the receiver has 2GB of memory and so can store a huge amount of images, which usually weigh in a few hundred K.
Demo artist Guido Möller also managed to get up to 65 layers and then stopped! He reckons there’s probably room for 256.
The Inkling detects pen motion via a mixture of infrared and ultrasonic, and can resolve to less than a mm.
Certainly the doodles we did were carried over almost perfectly – and you can always tweak each stroke anyway, if there’s a minor error.
The Inkling comes in a neatly self-contained case, which also doubles as a charging station, complete with four extra nibs.
Receiver and pen charge up in less than three hours and can be used for around eight hours in continuous use.
At a shade under £150, we think this a perfect addition to your toolset – and an ideal Christmas present for the artistically inclined.
Wacom also showed us the brand new Cintiq 24HD widescreen display.
Posted on Tuesday, September 13th, 2011 at 10:44 am under News, Products, Reviews. You can subscribe to comments. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.
Tags: Cintiq 24HD, Inkling, matte painting, Wacom
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