I've been working on the image of a character from the anime D.Gray-man (on and off) for longer than I want to own. I started the image in inkscape 0.45. Part of the reason it's slow going is I've been running into a lot of bugs in 0.45. The file has gotten big enough to be slow working now, too. I'm going to try and split it up some how. I got tons of questions:

Are the gradients a big part of what is slowing down inkscape? Should I put those in last?

Will installing 0.46 automatically upgrade inkskape 0.45? And is 0.46 fully compatible with images from 0.45. I've installed a lot off upgrades in the past-- only to find it messed up my old documents just enough to make them un-useable. There is one new feature in 0.46 I'm dieing to try. I've got a couple of other images in 0.45 that I don't know if I'll ever finish, but I'd like to keep them as workable also.



Larger View Here: http://earlyblake.deviantart.com/art/Al ... s-88017788

Comments on the image would be cool too. I just realized I should probably have posted this in the question section, but oops too late now.


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Here is an image I just finished. It's nothing special, so I'll just tack it on to the end of this post I wanted to see how fast I could bang out a fan comic in inkscake. Still took some time but probably fast than my crappy drawing, scan and then clean up. It's a drawing of two characters that die in Bleach. In the comic they get reincarnated as earth worms.



That box in the upper left corner is some weird 0.45 artifact. That I can’t get rid of, but since it’s only a fan comic, I don’t care.

Kewl stuff. Love the worms

If you've started a drawing in 0.45 you should have no problems continuing it in 0.46. Gradients shouldn't slow down Inkscape, but blurs will.

There are a few rare corner cases where Inkscape 0.46 has some issues with 0.45 documents, but it's very unlikely that you'll stumble upon any of them. If you like being on the save side you can just install 0.46 in parallel. If you find some issue just post it here and I'll take a look.

microUgly wrote:Kewl stuff. Love the worms

Thankz

microUgly wrote:If you've started a drawing in 0.45 you should have no problems continuing it in 0.46. Gradients shouldn't slow down Inkscape, but blurs will.

Ah, I had a different blur on almost ever shadow and most of the highlights. The blur was one of the glitches I was running into. I keeps dropping the blurs off of the shadows. Epically if a group with items that aren't blur and move stuff around.

The highlights were getting in the way so I moved a lot of the to the back. Is blur on gradient worse for slowing things down? Because the highlights were mostly blurred linear gradients with multiple stops. I may go delete them and see if I can move stuff around faster. I probably shoud have put them in last anyway.

Do blurs also increase the time to convert to a png file?

aho wrote:There are a few rare corner cases where Inkscape 0.46 has some issues with 0.45 documents, but it's very unlikely that you'll stumble upon any of them. If you like being on the save side you can just install 0.46 in parallel. If you find some issue just post it here and I'll take a look.

I don't know if I'm tech-savvy enough to do a paralell install. I probably should because inkscape 0.45 has crash 3 times on the D.Gray-man drawing. It's not crashing on the simpler drawings. It always gives me a polite unable to save file message while it's crashing.

>Do blurs also increase the time to convert to a png file?

Yes, see also:
http://kaioa.com/node/30

>I don't know if I'm tech-savvy enough to do a paralell install.

On Windows that just means installing Inkscape into a different directory than the previous version. Right now I have 5 or 6 different Inkscape builds installed.

I wanted to see how the object > clip, object > mask features worked. I used clip, mask and (black and white) gradients to make an embossing effect for a button. I was happy with the results, but I think I over did it. Even though I shrank it way down, it looks really out of place next to all the flat elements of the image it made it for.

Looks really nice. I agree that it looks a little too realistic compared to the rest of the drawing.