Flame Painter 4: New Key Features

Soon to be released Flame Painter 4, a new edition of a standalone paint and particle effects package will include amazing new brushes, particle systems, and an advanced Brush Creator panel. In today’s blog, we’d like to introduce the next big improvements that will make you enjoy working with Flame Painter more than before, including the Import of vector paths, Symmetry tool, Canvas Size & Transform tool, Navigator panel, Filters menu and more.

Import Vector Paths

Groundbreaking feature for the next Flame Painter release is the import of an SVG file - either to one layer as a bitmap or to multiple layers as a vector which can be further edited according to your needs. Switch between brushes, edit the brush in Brush Creator or select different colors or gradients to match your specific design. The brush strokes will be applied to the imported vector paths automatically. This will make designing your project extra fun and speed your workflow up. Well, as long as you don’t lose track of time while trying all the amazing possibilities that exist :-)

Symmetry Tool

Flame Painter 4 will feature a new tool for creating symmetrical designs. It will be super easy to create beautiful symmetrical artwork with any brush using only a few paint strokes with your mouse or tablet pen. Follow your artistic intuition and choose different colors or gradients to produce a fascinating scene. And to enjoy this tool more, paint the shapes on a vector layer and watch the design update while switching between various brush presets, particle systems, colors or gradients.

Advanced Palette Panel

The advanced Palette panel in Flame Painter 4 will give you many new options for your work. You will be able to choose any Color from the Palette which can be displayed as RGB, HSL, HSV, or HSLuv. Moreover, you can choose from the default list or create own beautiful Gradient transitions for your brush preset and apply them on the stroke, lines or dots, based on what engine your brush preset was created with. Finally, set how many times the gradient should repeat on the stroke and in what direction - either on length (horizontally) or width (vertically).

( A ) - Single Color, ( B ) - Gradient on Length, ( C ) - Gradient on Width, ( D ) - Gradient on Dots

Lastly, you can choose to apply the palette from an Image - this option lets you import your own images. The image will be mapped on the stroke, lines or dots and can also be repeated on both length and width of your strokes.

Canvas Size Tool

Previous Flame Painter versions were missing a few tools which forced artists to switch to Photoshop repeatedly in order to get things done. One of these was a tool for resizing the image. Luckily, Flame Painter 4 will introduce Canvas size - a new tool that will serve for cropping, scaling and resizing your work. Resize of the canvas in Flame Painter 4 has been designed to be very easy and interactive - resize by using the control points, or by entering the desired size of a new canvas in the edit boxes. You will also be able to resize the image and change its DPI accordingly. The size of your canvas in Flame Painter depends only on your computer’s memory.

Pick Color Tool

Another new tool we’ve implemented to Flame Painter is the Pick Color tool. Now you can pick colors either from your photograph to match a specific palette or from your current layer or all layers. You will also be able to set a sample size here.

Selection Tool

The next convenient feature in Flame Painter 4 that will make your switch to PS less regularly will be Selections. These are going to help you select a specific area of the canvas and perform operations on this selected area. There will be various types of selection tools available: rectangular, elliptical, polygonal and freehand. 

We’re also adding the Magic Wand that will create selections based on the tone and color of the pixels. You can specify the Tolerance, Antialiasing, Contiguous selection, or Use Alpha channel. Tolerance determines the color range of selected pixels, Antialiasing creates a smoother-edged selection, Contiguous selects only adjacent areas using the same colors and Use Alpha determines the alpha channel of selected pixels from the background.

Filter Menu

Besides Tile, Glow, and Blur, our development team has implemented standard color adjustments settings to Flame Painter 4 under the Filter menu. The new filters include:

- Brightness / Contrast, Hue / Saturation / Lightness
- Color Balance, Color Filter, Colorize
- Desaturate, Invert
- Black to Alpha, White to Alpha

You will find the last set of filters ‘Black to alpha’ and’ White to alpha’ very useful, especially when you import a picture with a background you want to get rid of.

Improved Fill Tool

The improved Fill tool in Flame Painter 4 will be able to fill not only the whole layer with the selected color or gradient but also the already painted strokes. Internally the stroke will be selected with a magic wand tool according to its color, then the chosen palette will be applied on this stroke with one click.

Improved Transform Tool

We’ve improved the Flame Painter 3′s Transform tool to the new version - it now enables you to move, scale and resize the selected layer or layers. We’ve also added the possibility to rotate layers or selections and flip them horizontally or vertically using one single click or shortcut.

Photoshop Plugin 

Flame Painter 4 will feature an updated Photoshop plugin - Flame Painter Connect - for exchanging layers. Export layers back-and-forth between Flame Painter and Photoshop quickly and easily. 

Other New Features

• Navigator panel to quickly change the view of your artwork using a thumbnail display.

• Drag & drop to easily drag & drop brushes, gradients, images or files directly from the web browser or file manager.

• “New Artwork” window with multiple default size presets available and the possibility to save custom presets in centimeters, inches or pixels with custom DPI.

• Lock in Layers panel in order to lock a layer to prevent it from any unwanted changes, and lock transparent pixels of a layer.

• Preferences panel to set the General, Tools, Tablet and custom Keyboard shortcuts preferences.

Pricing & Availability

Flame Painter 4 will be available on our website next week for the full price of $89.99 USD. All existing owners of Flame Painter are eligible for more than 50% discount - regular upgrade price will be $39.99 USD.
Users who purchased Flame Painter 3 within the last three months, i.e. from March 1st, 2019 will be eligible for a free upgrade.

Moreover, with the release of Flame Painter 4, we’ll also release three particle systems Liner, Fuzzy and Elastic as add-ons on our website. The particle systems can be purchased for $19.99 USD each. All three particle systems will be bundled together for an introductory price of $39.99 USD.

Next week, we will send out newsletters with more information on how to upgrade - definitely check your Inbox so you won’t miss it!
By the time, let us know in the comments what new features you’re looking forward to the most and we’ll pick another winner who’ll get a free copy of Flame Painter 4!

Your Escape Motions Team