In this ultra cryptic folder is a thumbnail in PNG format by which you can determine what Material you are looking at. One folder down from there we find the actual database entry for your Material, in a folder named with what appears to be a 32 digit hex code, decided into groups of 10-4-4-4-10. Each folder can hold similar sub-folders (again made up of two digits). This folder has sub-folders consisting of random two digit numbers.

On both Mac OS X and Windows, Materials are saved in /Users/you/Documents/Smith Micro/Manga StudioCommon/Material. Hence there is no way to import or export Material Data to and from Manga Studio.Īnd believe me I’ve tried: First I figured out where your data is stored on the hard disk. Huzzah!Īs much as I love Manga Studio and its versatile interface, there’s one thing that the team have missed: adding an option to export such things as Materials and Brushes. When you’re done click OK and your Material is now available for use. You can also give your Material tags to aid searching (click the little icon at the bottom right to add a tag). It’s great to know you’ll be able to find your treasures again in various ways. Click the disclosure triangles to see sub categories. Manga Studio will display your Material alongside its default arsenal which is huge – therefore it’s important to pick a category for your Material from the list on the left. For larger images which are not meant to be tiled simply unstick the tiling box.

For seamless tiles, choose vertical and horizontal. Now you can give your Material a name, define if you’d like it to be scalable and if it should be tiled when repeated (and if so how). This will bring up the following dialogue box: Open the image you’d like to materialise, then head over to Edit – Register Image as Material. Let me show you define your own pattern images as Manag Studio Materials and where to find them on your hard disk. All this happens on dedicated Material Layers. Once in place you can scale and rotate it. This is how Materials work in Manga Studio: create a selection (say around the coat in question), then simply drag in the material it should have. That way the coat looked like it had texture (without distortion mind you). In the olden days, traditional Manga tone artists would cut out small pieces of a pattern out of a larger piece of paper, then stick it to the coat of a drawn figure.

These are akin to Photoshop’s Patterns, but I find they are implemented so much better in Manga Studio.

Manga Studio has a great feature called Materials.

Brushes for manga studio 5