Piranesi: What's New in Version 5

- 2.4.07 - Welcome to Piranesi 5 for Windows! In Piranesi 5 you will find a reorganised user interface that makes it easier to learn, easier to find your way around, and yet manages to release more of the screen space for the image you're working on. There's a whole range of other new features and improvements to Piranesi and its sister program Vedute. We've also given you an extra 200 royalty-free images to use in your work.

New features in version 5 include:

Help Assistant
When you start up Piranesi 5 for the first time, you will immediately notice the new Help Assistant. This tells you how the current tool you are using operates, and gives you a few tips on how to use it to best advantage. It changes automatically each time you select a new tool, and links directly to the full Piranesi Help if you want even more information. The Help Assistant is set up for you as a thin vertical panel which uses relatively little screen space, though if you prefer you can change its position or dismiss it entirely.

New Tools for Old
We've promoted a number of Piranesi 4 effects to be Tools in their own right. This makes them easier to find on the Tools toolbar, and if you have the Help Assistant turned on you'll be given step by step advice on how to use them. So now you have specialised Tools for: Text creation, Edge detection, Restore, Smudge, Construct, Filter

Prior to Piranesi 5, text creation was an option to the Montage tool, and the others were "Render Actions". Meanwhile the Piranesi 4 Pen has turned into a Pencil! Use it and you'll find you can do everything that you could do with the old Pen tool and more besides - such as creating filled areas and choosing between single and multiple line operation.

Global and Local Fills have been streamlined into one tool, with an option you can toggle on and off.

We're confident you'll find the new arrangement an improvement, but if you should lose track of which tool you're using just take a look at the cursor - it now looks like a miniature version of the tool. The cursor shape will also tell you whether you have any Locks active.
 
Tool Options
Most Tools offer different settings to the user, for example the brush shape and size. In Piranesi 5, the most common settings for each Tool are now right in front of you on the Tool Options toolbar. Most of the time you don't need to be bothered by advanced settings. If you do need them, just click the "Advanced" button which pops up a palette - which you can combine with other palettes to reduce the screen space used.

Incidentally, there's a new Colour, Texture and Grain toolbar sitting alongside the Tool Options, which houses the remaining effect components. Locks are handled by a new Locks toolbar.

Working With Styles
At the left of the Tool Options toolbar you'll see a big thumbnail image which gives a constant reminder of the currently selected Tool. Place your mouse over it and many of the Tools will respond, offering you options to graphically "tweak" the settings such as brush size or cutout hook position.

Now try clicking on the down-arrow next to the thumbnail, and you'll see one of the most useful improvements in Piranesi 5 - up pops your style library as seen by the new Style Selector! Now you can quickly access your styles without having to lose all the screen space that the old Style Browser used to occupy. (In Piranesi 5, the Style Browser has been renamed as the Style Manager and you only need to summon it for administrative style management functions.)

It gets better! Because the Style Selector is working on a per-Tool basis, you can choose to have different categories of your library pre-selected for each different Tool. So if you have the Brush tool selected, you are taken to predefined Brush styles, whereas if you have the Cutout tool you will be offered suitable Cutout styles. Similarly you can ask Piranesi to only show styles which use your currently selected tool.
 
Cutouts
Cutout placement is one of the most popular and productive features of Piranesi, and in response to user requests we've added more new features. There's a new Multiple Cutout placement Tool that places as many cutouts as you like, chosen randomly from a suitable set. Using it you can quickly populate a shopping area with people, or create a shrubbery or a forest.

Cutouts can be grouped and moved together, and there are new motion blur and silhouetting effects that can be applied to cutouts.

No Piranesi release would be complete without some new cutouts, and indeed there are 200 new royalty-free cutout images of people, plants, and street furniture provided as part of the upgrade, plus some new 3D model cutouts.
If that isn't enough for you, we've made it a lot easier for you to take advantage of all the models out there on the web - you can now import fully textured SketchUp or 3DS cutouts.
 
If that isn't enough for you, we've made it a lot easier for you to take advantage of all the models out there on the web - you can now import fully textured SketchUp or 3DS cutouts.

Light Tool
There's a new Light tool which makes it much easier to re-light your scene. Four different types of light (Point, Spot, Strip and Parallel) can be placed in your scene with the direction and strength of your choosing. The Light tool replaces the old illumination fades, and does everything they did and more.
 
Stamp Tool
The new Stamp tool allows you to paint with one or more raster images. You can use the colours from the raster file, or ask Piranesi to use the raster as an alpha mask to the current colour.
 
Automatic Style Recording
Ever created just the effect you want but forgotten to save it? Piranesi 5 has an option to record each variation that you use to paint with, then go back and save or clear later.
 
Vedute
Vedute may be Piranesi's unsung hero, but it hasn't been ignored! Vedute 5.0 contains a number of important new features:

- Raster textures are now rendered
- Parts of the model can be exported as 3D cutouts. Using this feature you can simulate glass by creating cutouts corresponding to transparent surfaces in the scene, and later loading them into Piranesi with a reduced blend
- Revised Materials dialog box
- EPix files can be created at specified paper size and resolution
- Material definitions can be saved (as .csv files) and re-imported

Creating the finished article
When you're ready to save your image for final processing or to send to your customer, Piranesi 5 offers you some valuable new options. Exporting direct to Photoshop PSD files is now provided, with options to create layers from materials or cutouts. Piranesi also offers colour management facilities, so that the colours you see on your output device and those you saw on the screen are as close as possible.
 
Plus much more...
Piranesi 5 contains more enhancements than we have space to list, but here's a few more:
- The Help information now contains several mini-movies so you can see the topic in action
- The menu bar can be floated and docked like other toolbars
- InfoTips have been improved especially for the colour picker (try it!)
- New "Check for Updates" command for Piranesi 5 upgrades
- Improved graphic feedback when "tweaking"
- Random size variation in brushes and stamps
- Invert Lock facility to reverse the effect of the active locks (e.g. paint all surfaces not in a given orientation)
- Multiple material locks can be set with a wildcard
- Separate X and Y repeat control for grains
- New RGB grain based on the restore RGB channel
- New Style grain to vary the grain with each stroke, from those in a library/category
- Place hook point of a raster texture at the start of the stroke
- Style Manager (the Style Browser as was) has a new Details pane and additional search facilities
- Improved viewing via better texture mapping and anti-aliasing
- EPix files display thumbnails in Windows Explorer
- URLs can be used to access files (library files, raster files, etc) directly from web sites

About Informatix Software International Ltd
Informatix Software International Ltd specialise in software for the architectural, engineering, construction, and facility management industries. Based in Cambridge, England, they sell their products through an international network of distributors.

About CU's 3D Group:
Computers Unlimited's 3D Design Group focuses on specialist products from a number of vendors including Nemetschek N.A., Abvent, autodessys, NewTek, Google, AEC Software and Informatix.