Genius EasyPen F610E Review & First impressions

I recently purchased a Genius EasyPen F610E as a replacement Pen Tablet for my laptop  (I would have preferred a Wacom Intuos 5, but barely being employed has limited my funds) for a little over $80 on Amazon. The tablet is light-weight, and slim, as promised, and the AAA battery powered wireless pen has a nice weight to it, though not quite as comfortable as the Wacom Cintiq Pens.  The first thing I noticed when opening the box for the first time, was that there were 2 CDs inside; a Driver CD, and Corel Painter Essentials 4.  Upon inspection, the CD had a label that said "For Windows 8 drivers, visit blahblahblah" which was kinda odd to me, considering that this device is practically brand new on the market, released on March 12th, 2013, I believe.

After installing the drivers and rebooting my laptop, I fired up Adobe Photoshop to get a test run of the tablet.  The surface felt good to run the pen over, but to get a response, it required a lot more pressure than I was used to with the Wacom tablets I have been using for so long.  The working area is nice and large, which is a real bonus, especially for the price of the tablet. The macro buttons on the right of the tablet require the use of the pen, which interrupts workflow for me, and having them on the right will take some getting used to.

The configuration software for the tablet is pretty barren, basically offering the most basic options, such as pen tip feel, and double click spacing.  There are a few other options to change from pen mode to mouse mode, backwards compatibility to 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity for older programs that do not support 2048 levels, and setting up if you want to work with the tablet in portrait or landscape proportions.  Other than that, there really isn't much there.  Since I don't feel like wearing out the tip for the pen (it did come with 2 replacement nibs) I decided to set the pressure settings to the lowest it could go.  This helped getting a more natural feel in Photoshop, but I'll get into that in a bit.  The instructions that accompanied the tablet were not much help in figuring out how to configure the tablet, and disappointingly referred to options that were not available for the pen tablet, such as Pen Tilt settings, and manual pressure tuning through the "Details" option.

After adjusting the settings as much as I could, I fired up Adobe Photoshop CS5 again, and gave the pen tablet another test run.  It felt much easier to work with, but to move the pointer efficiently, I could not raise it off the tablet like I can with Wacom tablets.   Instead the pen had to remain touching the working area to remain track-able.  For the way that I work (which commonly has me lifting the pen off the surface to start a new stroke) this was kind of irritating, and slowed down my working speed considerably.  On top of that, in order to register a "click," a significant amount of pressure is required, and I found myself using the buttons on the side of the pen more often than I am used to.  On top of that, the report time is slower than advertised, and working on the surface before the pen & tablet seem "coupled" returns a significant amount of artifacts.  On the plus side, once I got used to the way the tablet works, the sensitivity worked really well.  I tend to draw with a pretty heavy hand, so light strokes came out light, hard strokes came out dark, which was really nice.

All in all, this isn't a BAD tablet, per se, but it lacks the control and options that I prefer from my tablets.  I think that this tablet would be perfect for entry level artists, or those on a tight budget that haven't yet been spoiled by Wacom tablets.  Professionals and skilled hobby artists that can afford a more expensive alternative should really stay away from this tablet.  That being said, once I can afford a replacement, I'll likely be giving this one away.

Can I Get Some Props - Pt2

This is a design I came up with for a Sci-Fi rifle.  Yeah, it looks a bit generic, but I'm still pretty pleased with the way it's turning out.  Using my quick design sketch:

I then blocked out all the major forms in ZBrush 4R5, trying to get the proportions and pieces I wanted before I get into detailing the rifle itself.  Once it has been detailed, I will retopologize it, UV Map, normal map, texture, and package it for use in Poser / DAZ Studio.  I'm fairly pleased with its look, even though it isn't refined quite yet.

Please feel free to tell me what you think.

Can I Get Some Props? (A few Works-In-Progress - Pt01)

A creator of online 3D comics has been chatting with me off and on for a while now, and I have offered to model 3D props for more unique items.  I've already made a few props for the comic, and these are a few of my recent Works-In-Progress for it.  First is the Shield Emitter (it is a Sci-Fi comic after all)  Terri did an awesome job with the original design of the shield emitter, but based on the description of the technology, I felt that the original design was too rough and"blocky" when the society that uses the shield was described as sleek, sterile, and technologically advanced.  For me, "sleek" technology is rounded, soft-edged, and almost plasticine.  It also didn't help that the original design looked too much like the detachable bridge of the Starship Enterprise in a lot of ways.

After being told the the device is roughly the size of a pack of cigarettes, and that it hangs from the belt, it made sense to try to minimize the clutter of the interface, while trying to keep all the important elements intact.  Then I fired up Modo 601 and started working.  While this image is still a WiP (I have a few related projects going on right now, so I switch between them to keep them fresh) I decided to share it to get input and comments/crits.  It still has some development it needs to go through, but the shape is essentailly how I envisioned it.

You can take a look at Hale's webcomic here:  http://datachasers.thecomicseries.com/

Improving Artistically & Loss of Portfolio

For the last year and a half, I have been trying to get into the game industry.  Every place I applied, my skills were either not "strong enough" or not what the company applied for was "seeking."  I have decided to take a sabbatical from the job search, and dedicate myself to my artistic improvement.  I have been reading books, watching tutorials (free and purchased), attending life drawing sessions, an talking with other artists about their techniques and workflow.

Progress has been less than ideal, but in no way am I going to give up.  Also, a few months ago, my computer suffered a horrible hard drive failure on my back up drive, basically trashing all my prior work (bye bye, portfolio!) which leaves me essentially at square one.  Surprisingly, this was an awesome situation to be in.  I basically start with a clean slate, artistically.  So, I started up this blog to start tracking my improvement, review games that I play (both Indie & Triple A), and to have a second form of backup for my new portfolio and works.