A Unified Format for Sharing Painter Brushes

July 8, 2009

This project is obsolete. Corel Painter introduced new ZIP-based file formats for importing and exporting brush variants, brush categories and brush libraries in Corel Painter 12.

In my last post, I pointed out some of the problems with the way Painter brushes are currently shared. There are so many different ways that work that the whole process becomes very complicated very quickly. Of course the studio|chris Brush Manager solves the installation issues in many cases, but it doesn’t cover everything as mentioned in my last post. With that, I present a draft of the studio|chris Brush Metapackage (“Brush Package” for short) – a brand new file format designed specifically for sharing and installing Painter brushes in a very consistent way – whether you choose to use the Brush Manager or not.

Package Icon

Brush Package icon draft.

The full specification for the file format is still being written, but the in-progress draft is available for review and open for discussion here in this post (feedback, questions, and suggestions are welcomed in the comments!). The new Brush Package format solves every single problem discussed in the previous post amongst others.

Brush Package support will begin with the next version of the Brush Manager.

A Note to Brush Publishers & Painter Instructors

For those of you who switched to creating only Brush Manager compatible ZIP files – thank you! We all have to work together to make installing our shared brushes as easy as possible for users of all skill levels. This new format is intended to continue along the path to simplifying for those that use the Brush Manager, but also for those who do not. As the format shapes up, I’ll need your help once again to switch over to the new format instead of normal ZIP files. I’ll gladly offer help to make the switch if you need it, but with the automated process to be built into the Brush Manager, you shouldn’t – just click a “Package to Share” button, fill in some important details and be ready to rock.

Of course, there are more features that come into play with the new format, but I can’t go into that just yet – but it is going to be great!