Tool: Paint directly on your screen.

osman

Ok sorry for the vague thread title, I dont have a name for this app.

So, one day Pior came up with this idea and I decided to start working on it. I am not sure If this is what pior was talking about, but basicly it is a small program that will run in the background and wait for you to press CTRL+F10.
When you do this, it will overlay a canvas on your screen so that you can paint directly over what is under it.

So what can you use this for?
Well imagine someone is working on a model and you walk by. You see that he has some anatomy problems and you decide to show him how his model should flow.
So instead of waving with your arms to show the forms, you can simpy press CTRL-F10 and draw with simple lines the new shapes. When done, you can, if you want, save the image to your hard drive.

Very tiny tool, hope someone finds a use for it:). Suggestions/ideas are welcome.

DOWNLOAD

SyncViewS

Hi Osman, I've been looking for something like this for quite a long time, so thank you. It seems to have some issues on my system. I start it, see the splash, press ctrl+F10 and the blue frame around the screen appears, but I cannot draw anything unless I start the line over the blue frame (where the cursor changes from the standard arrow to a cross), and then I can only start a line from the blue frame or by being over another line already drawn.

I'm on xp64, with nVidia GeForce 7950GT, latest video drivers, if this helps.
EDIT: forgot to mention I'm on a dual monitor setup running standard nVidia Dualview mode.

Just some ideas
- Erase
- Select colors
- Multiple frames "scrollable" to make it useful as grease pencil tool for animation
- Straight lines
- Basic draggable symbols like arrows

breakneck

this sounds really cool, i'll have to check this out

osman

SynCView, I forgot to mention: It does not work on XP . I will have to grab my laptop with xp-installed to investigate that. I've only tested it on vista.

I think it may be because of how windows handles transparency. XP can't detect 0.0 probable and so lets you click on the forms below it.
A quick fix might be to overlay the whole screen with a subtle color.
Will see into that, thanks for letting me know.

ZacD

Could someone post a quick demo video?

SyncViewS

Hey Osman, I'm sorry to hear it's Vista+ only. Anyway for what I could see, line drawing is very smooth, much better than other "competitors" I tried. I'll follow this thread to see if you come up with a solution for XP. Thanks!

nathan

I've really been wanting something just like this.

only problem is, I have the same exact problem as SyncViewS, except that I'm on Vista64.
I do have dual monitors though, so maybe the problem isn't XP, but dual monitors? I notice the blue outline only shows up on my main monitor too, I don't see anything on my secondary.

my monitors are different resolutions if that helps at all.

I really hope you can solve this and get it to work on both monitors, cause I use zbrush on my secondary and that's where I'd be doing most of my marking.

osman

ZacD: [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgsQXcfn6gc[/ame]

Dado Almeida: Glad you liked it. Again, only tested on vista, but I think it should not differ so much with win7's way of handling windows forms.
As for the suggestions:
I will start working on the eraser
Colors are already in there, richt click when in 'paint' mode and select a different color and line thickness.
Lines, draggable symbols etc, will add these eventualy.

And yeah, you can paint on almost everything that is not fullscreen. Works pretty good for modelling packages and game-editors.

EDIT: You can start more than one canvas, so you can kinda do layers or a flipbook. This is not a feature, it is a bug used as a feature:P will have to implement something like that tho.

glib

Yeah on XP here at work, it works but I have to first click and drag from the blue border on the edges. I like the idea though! A very slight tint would probably be nice to let me know I've activated it anyway.

ZacD

looks great, Glib has a good idea though, I dunno about the tint idea, but how about a red line on the very edge around the whole screen? or text in corner?

Slum

haven't checked it out, but are you using WinForms or WPF? WPF shouldn't have any trouble with zero opacity on XP. I wrote an app for pinning reference images transparently on your screen (like translucent stickynotes for modeling, etc). and it seems to work just fine.

osman

I'm using WinForms, never looked into WPF, but people keep telling me to check it out because from what I understand, WPF is much more visuals orientated right?
Will change the border color to something like red and give the option for a tint.

Slum

Ah dude, WPF compared to winforms is like...it's just better. With a little poking around, you can do pretty much anything you want. It's pretty heavy memory wise (basic shell app around 25mb). But firefox uses double that so it's not too bad. It actually uses more ram on XP than Vista, since the WPF related stuff is built into the OS on vista.

MoP

wtf dude, you program as well as art? very cool

glib

My suggestion for a tint was just because you hinted that would get it to work on XP. Once I've drawn a line from the edge outward, I can use any part of the line as as starting point, so it's definitely a layer order issue.

Could it be aware of which screen my mouse is on as well? At the moment it only uses my primary monitor.

osman

Slum, sounds cool, I'm going to start playing with WPF now, and perhaps port it all over. Should'nt be so hard since most of my drawing stuff is written in a class-library all together.

MoP, hehe yeah . I see programming as a hobby tho, so nothing die-hard .

nathan

doh, my post above showed up really late...
I just wanted to point it out before it got lost on page 1.

same problems here but I'm on Vista64, so it may be dual monitors, not XP.

osman

I turned off Aero and I got the same problem, so It's definately something with transparency.
What do you guys, who have that problem, have your aero settings at.(if you're on vista or win7).
[EDIT]
Pressed 'save' to quick.
Currently, the only(non WPF) solution I see is to first capture the whole screen, paste it on my form, then let the user paint on it. This will fix the problem, but you wont be able to get movies/running games in the background. On the other hand, the painting and erasing will get much easier to do that way.

Hayden Zammit

Seems a lot like the new Windows 7 Snippet tool. You can save a section of the screen, then draw on it and save it.

nathan

yeah I have aero all turned off, that would explain it.