Thursday, November 18th, 2010 Posted by Jim Thacker

Mini round-up: cool new iPad apps for digital artists

Lots of CG artists love gadgets. And lots of CG artists love Apple products. So it comes as no surprise that Apple’s latest gadget has already collected its fair share of CG-related apps.

In particular, two recent iPad apps have caught our eye. Sükrü Cengil’s LightboxHD (above) offers artists a readymade tool for client demos, enabling the iPad to display two images side by side, wipe from one to another by dragging a separator bar, dynamically blend between the two, or isolate areas of a single image.

It looks ideal for anyone working in print CGI or retouching, and costs just €7.99 (around $11). You can read the full specifications on the LightboxHD website.

And in a completely different vein, Karl Willis’s Beautiful Modeler turns the iPad into a gestural sculpting controller, enabling the user to build up models from successive layers of ‘virtual clay’. (Okay, from metaballs.)

We’re not sure how practical a device it would be for professional work, but it looks a blast to use, and the lamp that Willis creates by exporting an STL file from the software to a 3D printer is very cool.

There’s no compiled version yet, but you can download the source code from Willis’s website.