Here at SIGGGRAPH 2005, Alias is showing the new Alias Sketchbook 2.0 on a 23″ Wacom display/digitizer. It’s an extremely nice display. At $2400 it’s not cheap, but then again there’s nothing like it.
I hadn’t seen the new version of Sketchbook either and I was pleaantly surprised to see the great work being done to it.
While I was at the booth, artist/sculpter/instructor John Vihilidal came up and started drawing me. He’d never tried a Wacom display before and had only test driven the original Sketchbook. In a matter of seconds he was drawing in Sketchbook quite naturally. He said the tools all felt quite real to him.
Later the technical lead developer of Sketchbook (Ian) came over and gave John and I a tour of some of the technical aspects of Sketchbook. I learned, for instance, that behind the scenes some of the effects are handled all as 16 bits and assembly-level written code in order to get the quality we now see in 2.0:
