Apex Media Manual

[pixelmischief]

Does anyone have or know where I can get a copy of the manual for Apex Media? I need to push some pixels and I hear it's the best option on the Falcon.

[dml]

Unfortunately I don't think I have an electronic copy, and the printed one is buried somewhere. But I can remember a lot of the controls.

 

Most common ones:

 

- right click in main window area to make menus appear/disappear when drawing

- press 'z' to zoom in a level, or '\' to zoom out (keys next to each other). can do this to zoom while dragging also.

- I think spacebar scrolls/centers the canvas at the mouse (e.g. while zoomed), but zoom/pan do this automatically as well.

- left click on an icon activates that tool. IIRC right click accesses settings for the tool

- you can clone the current image (frame) any number of times using the 'insert frame' buttons at the left and right end of the jog shuttle bar at the bottom

- with this you can set up animations. there's a slider on the jog shuttle to move between them, and a play button to play back the animation

- TC or 256 colour mode, and bigger-than-screen-canvas configuration can be set using the config icon somewhere on the lower left

- cut/copy/paste works mostly as you'd expect, but you can load/save the pastebuffer via a special entry in the load/save page

 

Importing/exporting single or multi-frame images/animations/brushes is a bit more complicated but it's all accessed through the load/save page. If you've ever seen Cyberpaint on an ST, Apex is very like that program for the Falcon - the Cyberpaint manual might be a clue for some of the key shortcuts too.

 

If you have a specific question I might remember the answer

Edited January 21, 2015 by dml

[Zogging Hell]

I remember doing half my A-Level graphic design on Apex, including a long animation for a fictional documentary, got a terrible grade because I only produced finished pieces and didn't show my working. Still would have been a lot worse without Apex, so thanks DML

 

Still hoping you'll update those pages with more info on Apex 3 - I was salivating over that back in another life..

 

Rainbow 2 might also be worth a look if you need 'natural' drawing tools, which is one of the few things Apex lacks.

[dml]

:-)

 

I have some Apex 3 material still to upload but haven't got around to it due to other things going on. My site is several years stale and quite a lot of stuff now waiting to go up, including that.

 

Yep, Apex was aimed at pixel painting/editing and especially animated sprites or other moving sequences for game dev (since that's what I was doing a lot of at the time). It has some other, more unusual tools outside of pixel painting (e.g. image processing/recolouring by brush) but for natural painting style on single images there are better alternatives.

[pixelmischief]

Dude! Get that new stuff up! I have started a development project on the Falcon and need all the tools support I can get!