LogInThe developers of Magma, a web-based collaborative art platform, have told us how the idea behind the app was conceived, provided an overview of the tool's main features, and explained how its multiplayer was set up.
Introduction
80.lv: How and when did you get started with Magma? What was the original idea?
Magma was born out of the vision of our founding engineer, Radek Eichler, who is an artist himself. In 2016, Radek wanted to professionally draw with his friends from across the world, but no other tools would let him do it. So, he created Aggie and published it online for anyone to use. This was the first version of our collaborative canvas technology.
The original premise of Aggie was simple - to allow artists from across the world to join a shared canvas and create together. However, in 2020, we realized that our technology was capable of enabling more than just collaborative art creation. We saw an opportunity to revolutionize the entire creative workflow by making it more streamlined, remote-work friendly, and cloud-native. That's when we committed full time and launched Magma, a platform that aims to provide creative teams with the tools they need to manage and present their work to people quickly and make their art assets available and ingestible into other workflows.
We believe that Magma has the potential to be a game-changer in the creative industry, transforming the way individuals and teams work and collaborate in the digital age. With Magma, creative professionals enjoy a seamless and efficient creative and collaboration process, empowering them to bring their ideas to life and share their work with other stakeholders and with the world.
Magma's Toolset
80.lv: What tools does Magma feature? What are its main strengths?
Magma's strengths are in its ability to pack high performance standardized 2D design tools in a cloud storage environment, along with robust communication features built directly into the canvas. In our web-based tool, artists no longer need to work in a silo and output their work through other communication software to others for feedback or revision notes. All artwork is stored in the cloud and Magma’s signature “Artspace” product offers the ability to invite an infinite number of members to provide shared access to all artwork in this space (think of this like a Discord server, but specifically for artwork canvases and project folders).
Traditionally, art directors, educators, and artists in 2D realms have devised (read: hacked) methods for pairing multiple software solutions for design, communication and storage to cross functionally manage projects, create together and share artwork. With Magma, these services live directly within the canvas, transforming the creative process through the simplification of tools needed and processes used, bringing joy back into the creative process.
The software's core design tools are:
- Variety of core brushes and brush modifiers for precise controls.
- Standardized layer transformation, selection, and lasso tools.
- Enhanced lasso brush that goes beyond standard lasso fills and can be used as a shape creation tool or eraser. This feature offers the ability to design quick silhouette shapes, and apply patterns for a variety of design applications.
- A variety of predefined shape tools, and a dense library of custom shapes created by artists for drag-and-drop application to the canvas designed to expedite concepting and enable quick iteration workflows.
- Filters include color correction, curves, blur effects, and hue/saturation/lightness controls.
- Commenting tool offers the ability to leave comments anywhere on the canvas for feedback or revision notes. In comments, users can @/tag any canvas collaborator who will receive an in-app notification of the comment, providing clear visibility for task tracking management.
Brushes and Layers
80.lv: What brushes does the tool support? Can users create custom brushes?
Magma offers a selection of core brushes for free users (Spark Plan) and a variety of additional brushes for paid users (Blaze Plan).
Magma’s brush modifiers offer standard customization, including size, density, opacity, stroke stabilization, shape, angle and jitter. With these modifications, users have the added ability to create brush presets, allowing for custom brush creation and quick access hotkeys for selection.
Magma’s enterprise clients have the ability to bring new brush sets based on the industry standard ABR file. In the future, we plan to allow for all clients to be able to import the ABR files.
80.lv: Could you tell us about layers in Magma? How do they work?
Magma's collaborative canvas offers a powerful layer system with standardized blend modes, layer clipping, and merging capabilities. With the capacity to host up to 50 users and 100 layers, conflicts are avoided through Magma's layer ownership system, which allows artists to take turns editing the same layer.
Canvas collaborators can create, own, and reorder their own layers, while canvas owners have full control over the layer system. The flexible permission controls, similar to those found in Discord, allow canvas Admins to assign designated roles to users, providing customization for instructor and student, art director and team, or artist to artist collaborations.
This level of control and flexibility speaks directly to the unique customization needs of creative teams, empowering them to create collaboratively with ease and efficiency.
The Software's Customization Options
80.lv: What parameters can users tweak to enhance their experience?
Magma’s browser-based design tools function on any web accessible device, whether it be screened or screenless tablets and all mobile devices. Noteworthy application settings include:
- Built-in keyboard shortcuts that are fully customizable and can be reassigned to a user’s specific preference.
- Assign essential custom shortcuts to mouse button actions (up to 5 buttons).
- Assign various actions for drag, tap, long press and double tap gestures.
- For screened tablets, apply actions for up to four finger gestures when keyboards are less accessible on the go.
- Built-in voice & video chat offers custom noise suppression & echo cancellation.
In addition to the customization options available to the individual designer, Magma brings customization directly into collaborative sessions to support flexibility for multiple users working in a shared space. Individual canvases offer ‘Admin’ permissions defined by members who are owners of the canvas or are designated as a canvas ‘Admin.’ Canvas collaborators can be given full access for editing or specific permissions controlled and defined by canvas ‘Owners’ & ‘Admins.’ Most notable among these permission options include owning & reordering layers, drawing settings and preferred communication methods. These high level controls offer tremendous flexibility towards making use of a collaborative canvas to suit all creative needs in a 2D space.
Collaborative Features
80.lv: How difficult was it to allow 50 artists to work together at the same time? What were the main technical challenges?
Designing a collaborative drawing engine that allows 50 artists to work together seamlessly was no small feat. The technical challenges were immense, as synchronizing a huge amount of raster data could compromise the high expectations of professional artists for fast and efficient tools that are essential for an effective workflow.
To overcome this challenge, Magma developed a proprietary multiplayer raster technology, designed with speed and efficiency as its core principles. We took inspiration from how MMORPG games operate, and the result is a collaborative drawing engine that enables artists to perform all operations locally on their device, eliminating any lag issues. The list of artist actions is then sent back to the cloud for heavy lifting and synchronization of the results between various artists.
Thanks to this approach, each artist can enjoy a completely seamless local experience, even when working alongside up to 50 artists on the same canvas simultaneously. Brush strokes created by other artists appear in real-time and are synchronized according to the network capabilities. Magma's collaborative drawing engine offers professional artists the reliable and efficient tools they need to produce high-quality collaborative artwork without any performance limitations.
80.lv: What tools does Magma feature for collaboration?
At the heart of Magma's collaborative features is the multilayer canvas that allows up to 50 artists to brainstorm together. This collaborative canvas is paired with video calls, real-time chat and commenting functionality, allowing team members to communicate and give feedback both in real-time and asynchronously.
Additionally, Magma offers a shared Artspace, which is essentially a workspace for teams to manage and present their work to people quickly. It can also function as a central art repository, reducing the need for trafficking assets.
Because Magma is designed to be completely cloud-native, it makes it easy to work remotely and collaborate with team members across the globe.
Future Plans
80.lv: What is your current roadmap? What other new features do you plan to add to the toolkit?
Firstly, we're working hard to refine and develop our best-in-class creation tools. This includes drawing features such as a symmetry tool, perspective grids, advanced brushes and the ability to store and display reference materials. At the same time, we're expanding the capabilities of Magma to provide advanced image manipulation tools, making it easier for professionals to streamline their workflows for concept art design, photo editing, and other creative endeavors.
We are also quite excited about AI workflows that are currently in beta testing. We understand that AI can be controversial, but we’re hoping to prove that by putting artists front and center, these features can have a positive impact on the space. To that end, we created a company manifesto that talks about our mission of ethically responsible AI which includes transparency and credit for artists. We see AI as a way to accelerate mundane tasks that can often slow artists down, and ultimately, a tool that will allow them to unlock even more creativity. It does wonders in conjunction with professional art education and when it works hand-in-hand with a stylus.
At the end of the year, we will also be tackling animation and 3D review workflows, which are often highlighted as choking points in the pipeline.
On the collaboration front, we're thrilled to introduce our upcoming feature called Multiboard. Magma will offer an infinite canvas for every team member to use as they see fit, from brainstorming and storing references to designing storyboards. This Miro-like infinite canvas will be a game-changer for creative teams, enabling them to collaborate seamlessly in real-time. Artists can create freely and seamlessly version their work in progress, without the limitations of pasting static images.
Additionally, we're working on exciting community features that will be familiar to Discord users, but specifically designed for artists. Our goal is to create a thriving community of communities who can collaborate, share ideas and inspire each other in a seamless and productive environment.