Western watercolor as new feature

Hello,  Is there a plan of adding western watercolor as new feature of expresii? I thought this will add more flexibility on your already great software.  Thanks.

I'd like to second this. There is apparently great potential for watercolor (western) in Expresii. The exsisting apps out there, like Painter, Artrage etc., don't mimic the dynamics of a soft brush, thus lack the great dynamics of strokes. Expresii could easily reach a huge number of audience in the modern designing industry. What a future. What a fortune.
As a Chinese, I love the traditional painting and calligraphy. But I think, by instinct, that watercolor plays a bigger role in modern world. Look at everything around you that has a pattern on it.
I do HOPE Expresii will support watercolor one day, not too far, not too late. But that's not a complaint from a customer.

If only expresii has the western watercolor feature, I would have bought the software already, being a digital watercolorist myself for my clients. Presently I am using other software for western watercolor but I am not very happy.

I hope for western watercolour simulation in Expresii too - was choosing between Expresii and Rebelle, and i chose Expresii - because brush engine simulation gives more "character" strokes.
In FAQ on site is stated what some other new media a planned to implement, and on Facebook page recently even posted what people interested in western watercolor can like this idea (i'm not using Facebook, so you can count this post as a my "like" and support of idea) and Nelson Chu several years ago already tried to made adjustments to engine to make it look and behave in western type of watercolor.
So I realy hope what it's addition to Expresii will soon see the light of day and fully rely on mr. Nelson Chu's talent and put my money on him =D
Btw, another western watercolor feature what both Rebelle and Expresii unfortunately lack on: paint granularity. In eastern ink, which Expresii simulate it's not presented mach, because mostly inks pigments are grinded into very small particles and are not seen much on the paintings. But in western watercolors this paint granulations plays HUGE role - such things very often used in landscapes for example.
Lack of granularity in Rebelle is discussed recently and Peter Blascovic (dev of Rebelle) said what they are looking in to implement it, so hope mr. Nelson Chu will make some of his magic on it and add adjustable options of granularity for paint as ammount of visable particles, their size (like radius fo effect look) and weight (for simulating their spread in water/paint fluid on paper). May be even to make such simulation as on/off option for people who have/have no powerful enough GPU

Thanks for all your feedback and suggestions. While we don't have an estimate of when it'd be done, we will try our best to get the most organic effect out - something that lives up to the name. When we say fluid flow, it's really fluid flow. When we say super hi-res, it's really super hi-res. All of Expresii (or the previous MoXi effort) was triggered by other digital paint app makers not living up to their claims. Since long time ago, Painter has the brush called 'semi-e' but it's really just a simple variant of a circular 'brush'. If you're old enough in the digital painting scene, you should remember that YouWontBelieveWhatItCanDo website, where they teased you about their 'realistic' watercolor tech. Many people were disappointed and thought that it is really impossible for digital watercolor to behave like watercolor.

When we release a Western watercolor variant or something, we'll make sure it's really great.  

For the meantime, we need your support. We already made some real advancement for the digital painting tech.  
What you can do to help is to spread the word. Tell your friends about Expresii. Share our videos in your social media.  Everything counts. Thank you!

Admin wrote:Thanks for all your feedback and suggestions. While we don't have an estimate of when it'd be done, we will try our best to get the most organic effect out - something that lives up to the name. When we say fluid flow, it's really fluid flow. When we say super hi-res, it's really super hi-res. All of Expresii (or the previous MoXi effort) was triggered by other digital paint app makers not living up to their claims. Since long time ago, Painter has the brush called 'semi-e' but it's really just a simple variant of a circular 'brush'. If you're old enough in the digital painting scene, you should remember that YouWontBelieveWhatItCanDo website, where they teased you about their 'realistic' watercolor tech. Many people were disappointed and thought that it is really impossible for digital watercolor to behave like watercolor.

When we release a Western watercolor variant or something, we'll make sure it's really great.  

For the meantime, we need your support. We already made some real advancement for the digital painting tech.  
What you can do to help is to spread the word. Tell your friends about Expresii. Share our videos in your social media.  Everything counts. Thank you!

talking about previous painting apps: i have few question to mr. Nelson Chu (btw is it you under nickname Admin ?) : when mr. Nelson worked for Microsoft on Gustav project/Freshpaint - in demonstration videos it looked kinda "little more advanced" than final product (Fresh paint) actually feels - in demonstration videos you could see 3D brush cursor which is similar to what we have in Expresii with YiBi brush engine - in Fresh pain now you cant see it and actual feel when i tried it recently was not so close and detailed version of oil painting what you could see in demo videos of Gustav project - did development of Fresh paint had some simplefication or even excluding of YiBi engine after mr. Chu quited development app?
and second question: Adobe indoorsed some very promising oil painting simulation work project Wetbrush by Zhili Chen - they demonstrated it 2-3 years ago and..nearly nothing since that time - you can try this app in San Jose Tech museum and on some exhibitions occasionally - i'm sure mr Chu knows about this project Wetbrush, so what is his opinion about it and probability to see that kind of simulation in actual paintings apps - is it techically achievable for current consumer PC with regular hardware (like gtx 1060-1070) or it is just demonstration promotional things?

This is from Nelson:

Many people actually think the 3D virtual brush is obstructing. Personally I don't think so. It seems to me it's just that people are used to seeing just a cursor and when something is different, they feel it's 'wrong'.

I left before they shipped it as Fresh Paint, so I don't really know how they decided on things finally. But I won't be surprised if they did simplification for performance reasons, or just don't like seeing the brush itself.

The brush engine in Fresh Paint/Project Gustav is a separate piece of work from Expresii's brush engine. It's mainly done by my colleague Bill Baxter. I believe they keep the engine the same, just they don't show the brush itself any more. And after seeing the latest version of Fresh Paint, too bad, they restricted the brush orientation controlled by stylus tilt and they even got the direction of the (round) brush tuft wrong!

I myself am not impressed by the Wetbrush project of Adobe. They spend too much computation on getting effects that can be done much simpler. I shouldn't comment too much on it as there's conflict of interest here.

So some "bad news" here from the "real art media simulation software front"  :
- first i had read recent Zhili Chen' and his colleagues' work papers "Brush Stroke Synthesis with a Generative Adversarial Network Driven by Physically Based Simulation" from recent (18 august '18) "Expressive" symposium (papers were available officialy in public and, btw, they mentioned Nelson Chu' work:) )..that was progress update on their oil (with other media mentioned as "possible") painting simulation software project, and now conception "little" changed in comparison to their previously demoed "Wetbrush" - now they use simulator (Wetbrush) to generate database of brush stroke examples to use them for teaching software with GAN what of the strokes depending on user's input is suitable best to render:  
  -1) it resulted in 1.5-2 times perfomance improvement, but now it is not true simulator anymore (it somekind of trying "morph" rendering basing on height and color maps from
      database to visable result)
  -2) it is not fully 3D anymore (no more overhanging paint of impasto technique possible)
  -3) team found some bugs which degrade final results - like height and color unintended changes during paintings with more strokes.
- Rebelle updated recently to 3.1..with more papers packs for 10$ each (now whole papers collection costs as program itself!!..oh, my), btw their developer was on recent Siggraph, but no any new info from there.

other known watercolor simulations from other authors are more like students personal projects at this stage on unusable level, so now my only hope for western watercolor simulation is Expresii as you guys ressurected my expectation with half year old post on facebook about your work on it, btw it would be GREAT to read some even little update about it especially with some video demonstration of it (old clips in post on CGTALK are unavailable anymore )

Thanks for your patience before my reply. I just posted one of the old videos on youtube for easy access:


IMHO, if Adobe was smart, they should have kept hiring Nelson Chu for digital painting tech development (if you're interested to read the story: https://sites.google.com/view/nelson-chu/with-adobe )

Adobe licensed MoXi back in 2006 but they failed to really make good use of it. They released Adobe Sketch in 2015 with very nice looking watercolor art in the front page:


but when you look at the process video:
https://vimeo.com/148723130

you realized that it was the artist painstakingly 'painted' the watercolor effect by hand.    It was more of the artists being so skillful that she was almost painting a photograph of an watercolor work with normal brush/blobs you find in other ordinary digital paint apps.

And the even funnier thing is, they would tell you they did research work on watercolor: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/watercolor-simulation-adobe-photoshop-sketch-sunil-hadap/

but look at those sample watercolor paintings by their in-house artist: https://www.behance.net/gallery/30217779/Watercolor-painting-with-Adobe-Sketch


Those were not that watercolor-like in my opinion. I think that's why they needed to hire that external artist for the front page art.

Another interesting thing is the Adobe Sketch app actually contains a watercolor simulator that gives effects very similar to a simplified version of the old MoXi:
http://www.expresii.com/blog/innovations-in-digital-painting-tech6607339

If it's really research work that they did, they probably would have published a technical paper like they always do. So far, we never see such a paper, so it looks like it's actually an adaptation of MoXi code to work on the iPad.

Sometimes I think these researchers totally miss the point, or simply going down a wrong direction. It is sad, because a lot of research funding was wasted IMHO. But well, Adobe is big, and they got the money to spare.

We will keeping working on Expresii. Sorry that we still don't have new researchy thing to show yet. But please keep supporting us, e.g. help spreading the word. Why does it matter? Because there're too many people saying things like "Real Digital Watercolor Painting in Photoshop" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrGNiDdIR9o and those would make people think digital watercolor could only ever be like that!