A feature in the Colors! Gallery that has been asked about a bunch of times is being able to embed your paintings on pages outside the gallery. Ben recently stepped up to the challenge, and I’m proud to show the first embedded painting here. (Instructions on how to embed stuff is available here).
Pretty one, isn’t it (and it looks even nicer in 3D). Go on into the gallery and like it, so he will paint more for us! It’s painted by my friend David Peixoto, who you will see more of in a future dev diary. I meant to release this one on Valentine’s day, but I had to put that on hold as Nintendo of Europe found a few issues in Colors! 3D that I had to fix. That went well however, and Colors! 3D is now in the late-stage testing.
Speaking of Colors! 3D, I wanted to briefly talk about other ways to export your works. In previous dev-diaries, I’ve mentioned two ways of sharing your paintings with the Gallery Integration and Paint with Friends. The third one is that you can export your painting directly to the SD card. A cool aspect of that is this: the Colors! painting format is vector based and because of that, you can export paintings in higher resolution that they were initially painted with. The default resolution for Colors! 3D is 854×512 for a standard widescreen painting, but thanks to the export, you can get paintings in resolutions up to 1600×960 directly from your 3DS!
This will of course allow you to bring your painting over to a computer, where you can do post it to Facebook or whatever. Also, thanks to Nintendo’s recently released SwapNote you can send your exported Colors! 3D paintings directly to the people on your 3DS’s friends list, and I bet that we’ll see more stuff coming from Nintendo to let you share the images on your 3DS.
Colors! 3D is coming out soon for Nintendo 3DS eShop and will cost $6.99. Follow the development on Facebook or Twitter.
1600×960? It’s a bigger resolution than my monitor display’s! It’ll be a day one for sure. It’ll be the ultimate reason to go get my first ever eShop prepaid card…
What technology is the work in progress video playback using? Is that HTML5 or Flash?
Also, why doesn’t the pan-zooming function work on that birds example?
I’m looking forward to using your application!
@GiPi, It’s using HTML5/javascript. Previously, we did the playback as a Java applet, but we changed it to javascript a while back. The Pan-zoom can be enabled as a embedding setting. I seem to have left that off. Will fix. :)
Alright! It’s nice, since HTML5 assures a lot of compatibility with all browsers for the future. Thanks for answering!
Since the paintings are stored as vector data, would it be possible to render it in even higher resolutions on a PC or maybe the Colors! Gallery server for printing purposes?
1600×960 ??that sounds cool but wont the picture bcome pixelated ??bcus its orgiinal resolution is low..and (anyway to download this picture in .mpo file ,,cant find it?)
@shash* A 1600×960 picture won’t be pixelated, because the original is stored as vector data. Vectors are mathematical elements, that can be rendered at any resolution.
Counting down days before release !
@Jens: is it possible to add keywords or a description from the 3DS ? That could be searched on the gallery ?
The embedidng solution is great. It will be the perfect feature to show off our paintings, especially in 3DS related forums!
Same for me anyways, this will be my first paid eShop software. :D
Nice update! Is there a .mpo of Ben’s painting we can look at? I’d love to look at the 3D version.
Painting embedding is a very welcome feature, thanks for that! I was wondering, will there be an app similar to ColorsDraw for outputting playback to an AVI movie?
Also, do you have a presence on Google Plus? I know that there is a large community of artists on there that I’m sure would be interested in your app.
@shash* & @DarklingDragon
Here a 1600×960 version of the lovebirds painting: http://www.collectingsmiles.com/blog/HNI_0197.MPO
This painting doesn’t necessarily showcase the 3D effect best though. So here’s the Fallen Faith one in 960×1280:
http://www.collectingsmiles.com/blog/HNI_0196.MPO
They can be viewed in the 3DS camera application.
@Ben, not sure how we are going to do movie-exports. We probably won’t update ColorsDraw, since we have the javascript version now, but we do need a good way to export video. I’ll get back to you on this. :)
And we don’t have Google+ yet. I should set that up though.
@GiPi: So, there’s a pre-paid eshop card? I’m all over it as soon as I know how and where to purchase one. Since you know. Plz, share the knowledge. :)
@Jens: This saves me a lot of time and memory when wanting to make a video file of my paintings. Saving an .avi file from the java applet takes up a lot of memory and then converting to an .mp4 or .mov takes a whole lot less. But, it is time consuming. And, if one does not have Adobe After Effects or some such program its like being up the creek without a paddle. It really would be great to have the ability to convert an .mpo file to an .avi or, “preferably” .mp4 or .mov directly from the software itself. I know it will take a lot more coding for the Quicktime video formats but, they are what the animation & film industries use when creating digital movies. (The reason? Higher video and sound quality and less memory usage for storing smaller files.) I’m sure that didn’t make it in so, if you do an update of this software please keep this feature in mind. Then we could upload directly to Youtube from our 3DS consoles. :)
Just a thought.
@Jens: I may not have been clear in my previous post. That was more of a request.
The feature you’ve given us is a way to post our 3DS paintings on a webpage or blog. Thank you very much for this. :)
@Jens: Will we have the ability to view .mpo files locally on our computers just like previous versions of Colors! DS? I like that function very much and would not want that to go away.
@inque, First off, I think you have misunderstood what .mpo files are. These are basically two jpeg’s merged together. They do not contain the playback data.
There is no way to export the playback data (the .drw files) on the SD Card, and you will have to upload a painting to the gallery to get hold of it. This is due to the restrictions on file access on the 3DS. Nintendo recently released tools to be able to export general purpose files, but it was too late for me to get that implemented in Colors! 3D. Also, another feature that didn’t make it in was the ability to upload private paintings to the gallery. So to be able to export a playback you will have to upload publicly to the gallery. Of course, you can always go in and mark that painting as private the second you upload it to keep it from being public.
So back to the ColorsDraw issue. I agree that it was very cumbersome to export .avi’s ColorsDraw since the files were uncompressed. This is due to the snake nest of video encoders out there. As far as I know, there are no free good video encoders available that are generally supported. Quicktime, Xvid, MPEG2/4, h264 encoding solutions are all under license that I think have pretty hefty licensing fee. Theora is one option that I think is free that in theory could be integrated directly into Colors! (developed in C++), but I think you still need custom software to playback Theora video. ColorsDraw was done in Java, where the situation is even worse. But we are moving away from ColorsDraw anyway, but I’m not sure how we can solve it for the new repainter (html5/javascript based).
A better solution might be to solve this server-side. Some time ago, I played around with an Export to YouTube feature for the Colors! Gallery, and I came pretty far with it (but it required another dedicated server). This would also allow you to get an .avi of your paintings directly from the Colors! Gallery. I might pick that up again soon as I do believe being able to do that would be a great feature for the Colors! to have.
excelente, lo espero con ansías, el único problema para mi sera comprarlo ya que aquí en donde vivo no venden tarjetas de recarga en la e-shop, pero espero conseguirla de alguna forma.
espero nintendo acepte pronto Colors! 3D para poder comenzar a dibujar :).
Saludos
PD: muy buen dibujo
I’ve been a fan of your app since the homebrew days. I’m glad you guys are pouring this much dedication and commitment to making Colors! 3D the definitive drawing app on the 3DS. I can’t wait do get it as soon as it’s released! I’m even hoping you guys could come up with an animation app in the future. *hint hint*
I am another fan of colors since the homebrew for the original DS. I am seriously excited for the 3ds version to release, especially since I never got an i-anything, and I will be buying it as soon as it is available!
thanks for the 3d image of fallen faith !!looks epic!!
I agree with shash. The images look great.
When I click the link on how to embed, I get a blank page.
Please help!
@ariaml, Oops. We had broken that page. Fixed.
how come colors! draw wont load the 3DS .drw files
Hey i have the 3ds version of colors and love it , i so want this program for my pc , i hate ps and other paint and editting programs , i dream of using program on my pc
Hello, um i need help. I recently deleted my colors! 3d account and im tring to make a new one but it saids to contact support@collectingsmiles.com and i can’t. i have the 3ds(xl) version. If you say that i have to use a computer well, its old and broke. Also to enter the #s: 3524583556. How can i create my new account? Please help bro.
Peace.
@creater, In order to to create a Colors! Gallery account, you will need access to a valid e-mail address. Because of the sensitivity of your message, we will respond to the e-mail address you’ve provided regarding your error. We hope to hear from you again!
Does embedding no longer work?