Autodesk deservingly has been lauded on this site and others for the rapid embrace of Apple’s iOS platform and award-winning mobile devices—iPhone and iPad. And it has also been noted in the past that the company recognizes the sheer computational power in these devices powered by Apple’s own A-series CPUs.
MORE: Amy Bunszel of Autodesk talks to Architosh about AutoCAD, Mac and the new iPad Pro
Thus, it’s no surprise then that the latest SketchBook 4.0 for iOS, by Autodesk, builds on this history of taking your iOS device to the max.
An All New Rendering Engine
Autodesk’s new SketchBook 4.0 starts with an all-new rendering engine that acknowledges and makes use of the power of Apple’s processors in the iPad Pro in particular. This new engine enables enormous canvas support, up to 10,000 x 10,000 pixels and a massive undo stack. It means when you make a mistake or want to go back to another point in the creative process, you can go back pretty much forever.
01 – The new Autodesk SketchBook 4.0 for iOS devices taps the power of Apple’s A-series chips and offers all new drawing and rendering engine.
Autodesk says the ultimate device for the new SketchBook 4.0 for iOS is the iPad Pro with Apple Pencil, but all of the supported Apple iOS devices will see speed improvements along with all the other new features.
Speaking of Features
SketchBook 4.0 aims to have more feature parity with the desktop version of SketchBook, with some SketchBook for Mac favorites now included in this iOS release.
This latest release begins with a whole new way of accessing full menus in full-screen mode. It’s called Rapid UI Mode, and Autodesk says it is designed to keep you “deep in the flow of drawing” and not lost in nested menu structures.
There are also new default brush sets, including texture brushes. In total there are now over 170 customizable brushes. The head’s up display (HUD) main marking menu makes smart work of accessing common or recently used tools, or what Autodesk is calling a “kind of automatic muscle memory selection” for the tools you used most.
Radial symmetry guides help users draw things like watches or automobile wheels or other radial objects with divisions up to 16 sectors. This helps with perfect symmetry on these types of designs. Also, helping artists along is Predictive Stroke, which is a popular feature that has come on over from the desktop version. This technology knows when you want some help in making your lines straight. This technology is scalable meaning that you can dial in just the right amount of correction to your free hand strokes, improving curves beautifully and when needed making straight lines straight.
Product designers wanted better ellipses and circle tools when drawing in perspective, features that also came over from the desktop version. With this tech, it becomes much easier to draw accurate circles and ellipses in relationship to other drawn geometry.
Product Video
The best way to see and understand some of these features is to watch them in action. Autodesk has a product video (below) and you can also check out more items on this blog page.
