Getting frustrated with trying to work with the canvas grid. help?

[Blue]

I was recently hired to do a tileset for a top down RPG and i'm attempting to use painter 12 to do this. I created a grid of 64x64 tiles (Canvas > Grid > Show Grid) and I need to be able to quickly and painlessly use the selection tool to grab separate tiles in the grid. Even with the "snap to grid" option the selection tool still doesn't like to play nice. This is a huge problem as I need to be able to easily copy/paste these tiles.

In the documentation i see that the selection tool can work with "snap to guide" but how can i make my grid my guide? When selection (Canvas > Guide > Show Guide) nothing shows up.

Any thoughts on how I can resolve this?

edit: while attempting to create ruler guides painter crashed on me. Yikes! although as soon as it quit it prompted me for an update, so lets hope that bug was fixed in whatever update was just released. I think out of my 8 hour work day today, I've spent 4 just trying to figure this out.

[Arshes Nei]

I hate to say this because I have complained about this in prior versions, but guides and rulers are buggy as hell. They cause the program to unexpectedly quit and you lose your work. Use another program if possible

[Blue]

well damn... that is going to definitely be a problem for me. Is there a workaround that doesn't use guides or rulers?

[Arshes Nei]

I'm not sure, you're trying to copy and move the selections, is that what I'm understanding?

[Blue]

I'll be painting large areas then breaking it down into tiles via the grid (ideally) and saving them individually as pngs. So basically, copy/pasting each 64x64 square into its own file.

[Arshes Nei]

Well why not paint it in painter, then import the file in another image editing program where you start cutting the grid? You can create a to help measure but don't use guides and rulers so you can cut it down?

[Blue]

Time is probably the big constraint to doing that. I have more tiles to create than I can count and I need to be as streamlined as possible. I also have yet to purchase a copy of Photoshop and I'm too old to pirate. hah. Aside from painter I am using Open Canvas 5.5 that I purchased last year... its fairly OK as a sketch tool but lacking for serious work. Painter is a recent purchase along side a cintiq 12wx.


So far my best work around was to use the line tool to manually draw out the grid and then shape tools to create tiles and flatten them out. This still has the problem of not being able to quickly snap the selection tool and copy/paste, but it is a step closer. As long as each tile is not passing the boundaries of its layer a "select all/copy/paste" will work.

Seems so bizarre that Corel has been working on painter for so long and the application is so unstable / unreliable to do this kind of thing.

[ikken]

I would suggest getting photoshop elements in this case, but get a demo first and check if it has all of the functions that you need for this project
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/in...lements&loc=en
$ 100 isn't much, and if you don't really need any of photoshop cs features, it would be a good side application for painter
(which I only use for its brushes at this point.)

[Arshes Nei]

Well why not use GIMP instead for the cutting, it's free?

[ikken]

I have no idea about gimp capabilities to be honest!
if it has a similar toolset, by all means, it's a good choice too than.

[Arshes Nei]

Oh yes, forgot also free for Macs and Windows - http://firealpaca.com/

What you need is an image editor. So I think this will work fine as well.