By: Rob Torres

I must add that my roots stem from a mechanical drafting background and I have been working with CAD programs for the past ten years, so I am extremely adaptable to different type of programs. I have taught CAD and written custom programs, menus and toolbars. This gives me a much greater advantage than the average crafter. As a teacher I will try to relate to my readers of this article on an art glass crafting level.

Intro: When I first went to sgdesigns.com and did some research on the software, I found the site to be straight forward, and easy to follow the benefits of the program.It was a no brainier for me, so I decided to download the trial version. The trial or demo version grants you 48 hours of use, that's only counted while the program is open. At first I thought oh wow only 48 hours, I hope I can learn this cad program in that short amount of time. I didn't dwell on that and jumped into the program.

The Pattern Wizard Review

• Capabilities
• Design Tools
• Import Export Features
• Glass Palette
• Material List
• Cost of program

Capabilities

When I opened The pattern Wizard I first browsed about to familiarize myself with the tools available. Like most people I generally don't like allot of reading unless I need specific info on how to accomplish certain tasks. The software was equipped with a nice but small selection of glass. Other digital glass samples can easily be added through copy and paste actions. The Pattern Wizard claimed to let me design fast, see an actual rendering of my work, make changes after completion and produce a materials list. Other features include importing and exporting of files such as a wmf and the native files that are produced through the program. Scanning in a drawings is also an added feature.

List

Design Tools

An adequate selection of tools are available such as drawing lines, squares/rectangles, ellipse, arcs, circles and curves. These tools are pretty straight forward, however there will be a learning curve when connecting and closing in an area to be colored. One feature I found invaluable was the "Find Problem" located from within the edit pull down menu. This routine will suggest how to correct your mistakes within the program when you ad glass colors. The change menu has some excellent tools also, such as setting your line thickness for the different lead and foil widths. Also available is the color of the lead such as copper , silver black etc. When creating Art Glass panels we are always faced with the use of bevels which The Pattern Wizard offers a nice selection of 58 standard bevels. While in design mode you have the ability to copy, rotate, mirror, flip and resize to name some of the more highly used tools. During the initial drawing you will need to subdivide lines to alter the shapes of curves and ad straight lines for borders. There are tools for this process under the Change Pull Down Menu, such as the "Subdivide" and buttons called ad points, and pull a line, all of which are most helpful. Other features include grid on/off (which can be sized to suit), snap to grid point which is needed for maintaining accurate and true squares/rectangles, and "Show Background" which lets you turn on and off the background image on the fly. Great during tracing a line drawing or image file. Once familiar with tools in this program you will be comfortable inside The Pattern Wizard environment.

Tips - by hitting the spacebar once you set the view to show the full image, Using a wheel mouse lets you zoom in and out. Zoom in close to fix problems with attached ed lines where coloring wont take. Double clicking on a color brings up the color dialogue box if you lost that color from your pallet.

List

Import Export Features

Importing and exporting of files such as a wmf, jpg, gif etc. are extremely important in the relationship of getting a design into The Pattern Wizard for transposition. Prior to my purchasing the software I emailed Patrick Roberts to ask a few questions one of which concerned this area.

Patrick wrote back with this information.

"Choosing Copy from the Rapid Resizer's Edit menu will copy the pattern picture to the clipboard, and then you can more conveniently paste that into a paint program to be saved as a JPG. There's no direct way to produce a JPG using the Rapid Resizer. The Pattern Wizard has a Copy Pattern Picture command in the Edit menu that does the same thing".

For those of you like myself who use a lot of jpg files this was of high importance to me. It should be noted that The Pattern Wizard can only import a wmf file. All in all an easy solution is to copy, save as and import as stated above. The Pattern Wizard will print to a regular printer, and should work just fine with a Plotter.

List

Glass Palette

The Pattern Wizard offers about 9 types of glass that can be mixed through a standard windows interface, of the color dialogue box. Additionally a steak color can also be added to certain glasses for the wispy and opal mixes. Once your pattern is completed and it's color time you simply double click from the pick glass side bar, adjust your color to desired specifications and click into the area to be colored. It doesn't get any easier than that. One suggestion i would recommend is to export a black line drawing for printing and enlarging and as a backup for future and different color renderings. Another feature of the color capabilities that The Pattern Wizard has is the ability to switch between an actual glass rendering and a solid color fill for viewing , with the latter looking much cleaner but less like an actual panel.

Along with other questions I had Patrick wrote back to me concerning...The Glass Pallet

You can add glass to the Pattern Wizard. You just put the pictures into the glass folders inside the Pattern Wizard's folder. The Pattern Wizard requires the glass pictures to be Windows BMP files. The Rapid Resizer can use almost any kind of picture file, except GIF.

Well now we can have our glass and show it too.

List

Material List

Ever important are the materials needed to fabricate. The panel shown above was used as an example to demonstrate the material list feature. When printing the "Pattern Statistics" only a glass list is passed on to the printer. I tried to print to a file but was unable to open the file for viewing. At best a square foot count is really a big asset when purchasing glass I am not sure if waste is calculated into the math, but a general rule of thumb for me is to allow 10 to 15% extra for waste.

What the statistics box shows is the overall dimensions, number of pieces, length of came or foil needed and the time involved working on the design through The Pattern Wizard.

List

Cost of program

The cost of The Pattern Wizard retails for $39.95 as of 09/03/02. The cost of the Rapid Resizer retails for $29.95 as of 09/03/02. If you purchase both you can save $9.95. I went on to the http://sgdesigns.com/buy.php site area to finalize my purchase. I chose the downloadable versions of both programs so I could receive them and complete a full licensed install, as I was anxious to get started. Everything went well with the purchase and I set to go.

FINALE

All said and done I am happy with the product, I found it to be cumbersome at first but was only experiencing the learning curve I spoke of earlier. I believe the software to be an excellent value for the money and would recommend it to beginners and seasoned crafter's who have some prior knowledge of computer skills. If any of you readers have dabbled in the paint programs then The Pattern Wizard is well within your reach. I found the program is best suited to design from scratch rather than importing and tracing over lines and images. It does do both well I might add. Color rendering is is excellent given the onboard working pallet. The finished design speaks for itself as a new frontier emerges into the Art Glass Crafts.

I gave this review 3-1/2 Legs

Rob Torres

List

Rapid Resizer

Our Review: No money has been accepted in exchange for the review herein.

Capabilities

Upon completion of my initial download, I opened the software to become familiar with the pull down menus and toolbars.

The Rapid Resizer's web site suggests the following:

• You take a pattern from a picture file or directly from a scanner.
• You optionally fill the pieces of your pattern with pictures of glass as well as colors.
• And you print it to any size you want (supports metric and imperial). Patterns larger than a page are tiled across multiple pages.

The program also includes an automatic piece numbering routine. There is a materials calculator which can be printed and is similar to The Pattern Wizard's calculator. You can easily turn on and off the glass colors which is most helpful when printing out a working drawing to get ready for fabrication. Units of measurement can be switched from inches to millimeters.

List

Design Tools

Since this program is not intended to create a drawing there are however tools with which you can alter the appearance of one. A handy Width & Height viewer located in the upper right hand corner by default. The size of the panel / design can easily be changed and there is a proportional check box to make sure the design is scaled up or down correctly. Although it may not be noticeable on screen, just hit the print preview button and from there you should notice a difference, provided you have previewed the design prior to that.

List

Import Export Features

Importing pictures is setup to open Picture Files of which a jpg is included This made life much easier for me as most of my drawing are formatted as a jpg. Other types are supported as well, you may have to investigate your possibilities.

Patrick wrote back with this information. A response to a series of questions I asked:

The Rapid Resizer can use almost any kind of picture file, except GIF.

To export files from The Rapid Resizer I went to the Edit pull down menu and selected "COPY" than I opened one of my graphic editing programs "Paint Shop Pro" and right clicked my mouse to paste in the new file. This procedure worked just fine and allowed me to further edit my file such as compression / size etc. As you notice on this site there are many image files all of which I need to be seen clear, in vivid colors and with the smallest file size as possible. For the scanners there is a toolbar button set up just for importing a scanned drawing / image. You have the option to select your scanner of choice, provided you are using more than one.

List

Glass Palette

It appears that there are about 16 different different glass types that work in tandem with the windows color dialogue selection box. The different glasses can take on the properties of the color of your choice. As with The Pattern Wizard a streak color can be incorporated using the glass palette within The Rapid Resizer.

List

Piece Numbering & Material List

The program comes equipped with a piece numbering routine that is quick and can be turned on and off through an easily accessible toolbar button. From Pull Down menu "File" select "Pattern Details" to obtain information specific to your design, such as:

• Size of design
• Length of Lead Came
• Aprox quantities of glass, with a note that pertains to waste, exact color differences, grain direction with respect to layout and cutting and marks on the design which may be interpenetrated as a lead line.

All this information can be sent out to your printer for reference of purchasing materials.

List

Cost of program

The stand alone version of this program retails for about $29.95 as of 09/03/02. I went online and purchased both The Rapid Resizer & The Pattern Wizzard and saved $9.95 for the set. Both are available in a download format from their site, http://sgdesigns.com/buy.php Everything went well with the purchase and I set to go.

List