For those of you who don’t know, our beloved Paint Tool SAI has been getting a sequel, which has been in development for a while. I just checked in today and there is now a downloadable zip with a test trial in it!
You can’t save anything created in it yet, since it’s not a licensed version, but if you want a taste of what’s to come, you can play around with it. I downloaded it and have been checking out the new features and will break it down below. To start, here’s a screenshot of my test canvas:
New Tools
Text Tool
That’s right my fellow artists, SAI2 will have a gd text tool! We’ve all been crying about the lack of text tool for years, and we will finally be able to wipe our tears and uninstall GIMP
Shape Tool
There is now a shape tool! It’s able to create circles, triangles, and squares at the moment. There is no preview of the shape when dragging, which is a huge bummer, but I assume (read: HOPE) that a live preview will be added further on in development
Gradation Tool
You can now create a gradient! The gradient will fill any selected area. I did the straight gradient, but there is also an option for a circular gradient, which I didn’t try
Scatter Tool
The scatter tool was a mystery to me at first, as you can see in the purple brush strokes I made. The basic tool is kind of just a staggered brush. You can change the level of stagger in the brush settings.
HOWEVER, after checking the other brush options, I found a solitary other brush - STARS!! When in black, it will just make black stars. It scatters them very nicely. When I switched to light yellow, it made multicolored stars. I’m not sure if they intend to add the ability to make stars monocolor or if they already did and I missed it, but I’m really really excited for this!
Effect Brush
The effect brush seems to be much like the marker brush in that it doesn’t blend much. It seems to be intended as a secondary brush so you can add textures without messing with the basic brush settings.
Other Features + Changes
Brush Style Tabs
Brushes of very different types are now in separate tabs.
Arrangeable Brushes
You can now right click and drag brushes around to move them (before, you could only rearrange them with a loophole by making many placeholder duplicates and then duplicating in a specific order.)
Brush Style Previews
There are now preview to brush styles in 2 different senses.
There are previews of the brush style choices
And there is a preview of the current brush and its settings
Slight Appearance Improvement
There have been some tweaks to the appearance that make it look much nicer.
The New Canvas window (and other popup windows) now have a clean, dark border (along with more settings)
And the client itself has an updated window
Higher Layer Limit
SAI2 has a much higher layer limit. There’s more info on the official Systemax website, but I think its like 8k layers or something insane like that
Higher Resolution Limit
You can now have a canvas up to like 100k x 100k pixels. Assuming your computer can handle it lmao
Join Me in Anxiously Awaiting SAI2′s Official Release
I hope I’ve just made a lot of artists very happy. I know SAI2 is not widely known about and I’m excited to invite many many artists to anxiously wait for this with me! Spread the word c: