PaintTool SAI Ver.2 Scatter Brush Tricks

Introduction

With the introduction of scatter brushes in SAI Ver.2, I've found a couple cool things you could do that you couldn't previously. Basically, we're gonna abuse the fact that scatter brushes are actually just typical stamp brushes, and we're going to set some parameters to remove the scattering effect.

Semi-transparent Pixel Brushes

One thing you can do is make semi-transparent pixel brushes that alpha blend with what's already on the canvas. There's a Pixel Art Pen available in SAI that has an opacity setting, but you can't tie it to pen pressure, and instead of alpha blending with pixels on the canvas it simply overwrites the alpha value of any pixels it stamps.

To better illustrate what the hell I'm rambling on about:

Unfortunately, because you cannot disable the filtering applied when changing brush size, you will need to make a separate brush/texture for each size. Furthermore, you cannot use size pressure with these, only opacity pressure.

To set one of these up:

Create a pixel brush texture. Make sure the texture's canvas size has a 1:1 ratio (i.e 4x4, 5x5, 6x6, 8x8, etc.). See below for sample texture file.
Put that texture in Documents\SYSTEMAX Software Development\SAIv2\settings\scatter. Give it a good name (i.e. "Round Pixel 8x8").
Download the below INI file and save it to the same folder. Name it the same as the texture you just created.
Open up SAI and create a new scatter brush. Select your texture from the dropdown list. It should pull the settings from the INI.
Set your brush's size to be the size of the texture (if it's 8x8, then set the brush size to 8). Never change the size, ever.

Files: 2		4.71 KiB
	Pixel.bmp	1.12 KiB
	Pixel.ini	3.59 KiB

Square Brushes

The principle for this is the same, though a bit less rigid. With this sort of brush, you actually can change the size, since we're assuming the purpose is for larger resolutions and normal drawing/painting. Though, it doesn't look like you can use size pressure... I'm not sure if this is a bug or I'm not understanding something about scatter brushes.

To set one of these up:

Create a brush texture. See below for sample texture file.
Put that texture in Documents\SYSTEMAX Software Development\SAIv2\settings\scatter. Give it a good name (i.e. "Square").
Download the below INI file and save it to the same folder. Name it the same as the texture you just created.
Open up SAI and create a new scatter brush. Select your texture from the dropdown list. It should pull the settings from the INI.

Theoretically you can make whatever brush tip you want. This is pretty basic functionality, creating a simple stamping brush like this, but it's unfortunately something SAI doesn't really have by default (I think). That's okay, because SAI's awesome in other ways, but this is a way around it for the time being.

A couple notes:

You'll want to make the texture a decent size, i.e like 256x256 or so to avoid it looking nasty and blurry when working with large resolutions.
If the brush is slow to paint with, trying messing with the spacing. My INI file has it set to 5% by default, which worked well for my not-super-powerful gaming rig that my friends built for me from spare parts. If it's still slow for you, try like 10% or something. You could also try making the texture smaller, although that may affect the appearance of the brush.
If you leave the brush shape as the default "Simple Circle," you may notice that the brush actually feels quite a bit different than SAI's standards pencil tool... it almost feels more like the round brushes in Photoshop. Try playing around with it.

Files: 2		68.64 KiB
	Square.bmp	65.05 KiB
	Square.ini	3.59 KiB