What’s new
 
 
 

Lagoon preferences

Preferences for changing not only the lagoon, but also marking menus has been added. Create your own marking menus, populate the lagoon with the options you use most frequently. If you never use a tool, take it out and replace it with one you do. This tab gives you complete control over these domains.

In addition to all this, now when you’re working, you can right-click to access a virtual floating lagoon. It uses the setting from the Lagoon Preferences.

These setting are saved to an .xml file, so you can save them to a portable hard drive, take them with you to use on any machine, and always have your custom setup.

Customizing lagoon icons
Custom marking menus
Resetting your preferences

Rulers

Two rulers have been introduced: a straight edge and an elliptical.

Straight edge ruler Elliptical ruler

Only one can be used at a time. They can be accessed through hotkeys, R for the straight ruler and E for the elliptical. Before painting, the rulers displays guidelines; however, once you start painting, they disappear. Once you finish painting, they reappear. The last location of a ruler is saved, so that the next time you access a ruler it appears at the same place.

When a ruler is activated, at the top of the canvas, a hub appears. It provides the X and Y positional coordinates, along with the angle of rotation. The elliptical ruler contains additional A and B coordinates for the distance of each side from the center of the ellipse. As changes are made to the rulers, these values update.

Showing/hiding a straight edge ruler
Showing/hiding an elliptical ruler

Blur and Sharpen

These brushes enable you to change the appearance of the area they are applied to in the following way:

Blur

Softens the areas it’s used on, making it appear out of focus.

Sharpen

Makes an image look crisper; sharpening the areas it’s used on.

Simply paint over the area with the brush to use it. Open their preferences, by either double-clicking the brush or selecting Show Brush Properties , to change their size or strength. At any time, you can save these settings or reset the brush to its default settings.

Blurring an area
Sharpening an area

Brush Manager

Use the Brush Manager to organize and manage your Do-It-Yourself brushes. Click-drag to move a brush and change its position in the palette.

Organizing Do-It-Yourself brushes

Texture Brush

Once a Do-It-Yourself brush is created, you can add a texture to it, creating a texture brush. You can set the shape and/or color and make a texture from a rotated stroke or capture something on your canvas to use as a texture. See Create a Do-It-Yourself brush.

Create a texture brush

In the Brush Properties of a Do-It-Yourself brush, you can create a texture brush by sketching a design and capturing it. The captured texture can also be rotated. When capturing a texture, one of the following Custom Texture settings can be selected:

Creating a texture brush

Modify a texture brush

There are many ways to modify a texture brush, from resetting it, opening its properties and changing settings, changing a stroke, or assigning a permanent color to it. See the sections that follow for more information.

Resetting a brush
Changing texture brush properties
Changing a texture
Setting color on a Shape texture brush

Do-It-Yourself brushes

Now, you can export and import Do-It-Yourself brushes. They can be shared and taken with you to use on other machines. Email brushes to friends to try. You created a brush on a Mac and want to use it on Windows – no problem! Export the brush, save it on a jump drive, then on the other machine, import it.

Exporting a Do-It-Yourself brush
Importing a Do-It-Yourself brush

Symmetry

The Symmetry tool enables you to turn mirroring on and off as you sketch, using hotkeys. The X hotkey displays a vertical axis of symmetry and Y a horizontal axis. Anything drawn on one side of the axis is mirrored. The axis of symmetry and a close button are always present. Regardless of canvas orientation, the axis is always centered on the canvas.

Sketching with symmetry

Add Image: import into a new layer

If you have an image you would like to add that needs to be imported to a new layer, in the general preferences, check Add Image: import into a new layer.

Adding an image to a new layer

Non-proportional scale

Layers and selected items can both be non-proportionally scaled. You can scale in one direction, instead of uniformly.

To non-proportionately scale the layer, in the Transform Layer puck highlight the top of the middle circle, then do one of the following motions:

For selected items, in the Transform Layer puck highlight the top of the middle circle, then do one of the following motions:

Rotate canvas

When drawing, use this to reposition or rotate your sketch to create a more comfortable brush stroking angle. Think of this as rotating your paper when drawing. Use either of the following rotate canvas functions to change the orientation of the image.

Rotating your canvas

Autodesk Area

This new feature, found in the Help menu, takes you to Area (http://area.autodesk.com/sketchbook), a place where you can link to SketchBook Pro and other Autodesk communities.

Buy SketchBook Pro

This new feature, also found in the Help menu, takes you to our e-store, where you can purchase SketchBook Pro, from anywhere in the world.