DeviantArt Muro | Hacker News Reader

DeviantArt Muro

muro.deviantart.com

170 pointsiamelgringo38 comments

Really bad title: new online drawing application from devianART.

This sort of demo was shown before on here as part of HTML5 demos - but I don't think they claim to work with WACOM as this one claims to (via plugin).

Really awesome.

It's freemium, you can pay for extra brushes.

Here's the old thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1586905

My bad. I was a bit sleepy when I submitted the link. And, I hadn't seen the prior link.

To clarify, the parent comment was posted when the title was “Quite amazing…”. The current title of “DeviantArt Muro” is better.

Hmm - strange, this was submitted a while ago with an identical (minus the ending #) URL: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1595614

Surprisingly, the other one only has 2 points. This is another example showing how heavily other factors weigh in getting upvoted, as opposed to just purely the content of the website.

This is based on Harmony by MrDoob. Example: http://mrdoob.com/projects/harmony/ Fork on Github: http://github.com/mrdoob/harmony

Its a great bit of work, the brush engine is simple to pick up too.

I really wish deviantART would fork the github repo, its not a drastic departure from the current source. i'd love to see how the WACOM integration works!

I wonder how many people have paid for the extras in the DA version.

I don't think there is any special Wacom integration despite the "Works with Wacom" (what doesn't?), it doesn't take notice of pressure or anything like that anyway.

edit: My mistake. It detects when you're using the eraser, but that's it.

edi2: Actually some of the brushes do seem to be pressure sensitive but it doesn't seem to work on all of the brushes it should.

Thanks. I was on the harmony site for nearly 2 days straight when it was pulled for no apparent reason. I'm so happy to see it is back.

I wonder why it's based on that rather than a more conventional painting program. The 'webby' and 'chrome' type brushes are kind of difficult to use and get the effect that you want.

I also did pressure sensitive drawing for Colorillo: http://colorillo.com/blog/2010/07/pressure-sensitive-drawing...

What would you like to know about it?

Stranger things have happened with the harmony source: http://mrdoob.com/blog/post/696

As for the WACOM integration, the docs here seem reasonably explanatory: http://www.wacomeng.com/web/release_notes.htm - thanks for the offer however :)

Just had a play with Colorillo, looks great!

There really doesn't seem to be any code re-use. Even MrDoob agrees: http://twitter.com/mrdoob/status/20933173931 :)

In particular, the brushes behave differently. Note how in Harmony the currently-drawn line interacts with old lines, whereas in dA's one it only interacts with its own current segment.

Looks like your right, i cant find many similarities in the code. I had heard from a very good source that it was directly based on Harmony, perhaps only in concept it seems! Thanks for pointing this out. Currently eating my own hat.

I don't know if it can even really be said to be conceptually based on Harmony. They're certainly both drawing tools using Canvas, but that's like saying Photoshop is based on MS Paint because they're both drawing tools on Windows.

Harmony is all about the procedural generation of images by interaction with previously drawn points. dA muro doesn't really permit that at all... which is a shame, as that's a technique with really interesting applications

Are there competitors to deviantart? Because I have seen them reign supreme for many years now and cant recall anyone being as successful in this market.

dA is like Facebook. It's hard to compete with because it depends on the social network aspect. There are people with tens and hundreds of thousands of pageviews and thousands of watchers who have never submitted any art.

There are competitors. I know of three. I don't know that I would call them successful though.

http://www.paperdemon.com/

http://sheezyart.com/

http://storm-artists.net/

Disclaimer: I was a moderator at storm-artists.net for a little while.

That's a no.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/deviantart.com+sheezyart.co...

In the community aspect http://conceptart.org/forums/ was much better than deviantart (though they seem to have gotten much more commercial and I can't comment now as I haven't been there for quite a while).

https://renderosity.com

has a 3d orientation but same basic idea.

Can confirm it works great with a Wacom tablet. Pressure and erasing works. Info on using the Wacom plugin is here: http://www.wacomeng.com/web/release_notes.htm

who would have thought it would be so easy!

Similiar stuff and one of my favorites for killing time http://bomomo.com

Or I like Flame (but it's Java): http://www.escapemotions.com/experiments/flame

Seems to work on the iPad, except I can't figure out how to use the three sets of four buttons on the bottom right.

You need to earn points for access to those features - i.e. be a part of the Deviant Art community. Kind of a clever idea.

Works with iPad. A little lag here and there, but much better than any other canvas drawing app I've seen so far.

Does anyone actually use these web based drawing tools?

This is the exact question that I raise whenever I find a new one (and there seems to be many). Lots of people use Aviary but that is more a Photoshop sudo-replacement over a true "drawing app."

It would be great if someone did some deep traffic analysis on all of these.

DeviantArt has been awesome for a long time.

If anyone can pull off selling brushes as digital goods its them.

Nothing draws for me. Win7 64 IE8. Sigh.

IE9 beta ships in 2 weeks. Microsoft is finally going to get it right.

This is fantastic. Thanks for the link.

I'm unclear on how to save images with this. I'd think that anyone with a DA account would receive (and/or be able to buy) some file storage space and save their work to it for recall later, or on another machine. Instead, all I see is an Image->Export option. Am I missing something obvious, or is DA?

export image, right-click, save as, send to your gmail?

Yeah, that's lame. It should be more like "Image->Save", enter a name (and optional additional tags), and hit "OK."

How am I supposed to continue working on the image later, or on a different PC or tablet, if the only way I can save it is by sending it to GMail?

There's a save/load feature in beta. It just didn't launch with it.

http://devbug.deviantart.com/blog/34734592/

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