We ended last year with SIGGRAPH Asia 2016 held in Macau.  Little did we know it was a great start of an amazing year ahead.   For Expresii, there are mainly two major themes  in 2017: 1. Animation. 2. Microsoft.

Soon after SIGGRAPH Asia,  Angela Wong  took Expresii for a spin and made some simple yet impressive animations like  the Red squirrel  and the  Swallows ​. I think the Red squirrel  now becomes a classic sample for modern ink animation. A Japanese anime studio has been using Expresii for background paintings for some TV series but now Expresii is used even for foreground animation!       o͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡╮(^ ਊ ^)╭o͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡​

   'Ink Animation' (or 'Brush Painting Animation' or 水墨動畫 in Chinese)  was a proud product of China from the 60's-80's but there  wasn't much new development since then.  There have been attempts to do ink animation  using existing fluid simulation in 3D CG software packages but they mostly created something that look like fume (e.g. this) instead of Eastern ink painting.  Another popular way was to map captured real brush strokes textures and map them onto 2D or 3D geometry (e.g. those made with LivingCels) - which could make the animation look like  shadow play  where you see fixed textures shifting around. In 2017 summer,    Shanghai Animation Film Studio     (上海美影廠)   unveiled  a new title 《斑​羚飛渡》(youtube)    and gave a talk on the their new development on ink animation. However, what they claimed to be breakthroughs (building a library of stroke forms and combining 2D with 3D) aren't really breakthroughs.  

Now with Expresii we hope to develop a truly modern way of doing ink animation.   We are still experimenting and will unveil what we come up with when ready. 

We started to get attention from Microsoft near the end of last year. Once we got in contact with the right personnel  things happened pretty quickly. In April we secretly flew to Redmond to meet with Microsoft technical folks and management including Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Devices, Panos Panay, who was impressed by our Expresii. ​​Our saying 'every stroke has its own personality' struck him. He specifically asked to have our app ported to their App Store and we did . Panos asked why don't they  hire this guy (i.e. our tech guru Nelson Chu). And he was told  that Nelson did join Microsoft several years back and he was actually a key contributor to   Project Gustav, which later became Fresh Paint   - which Panos himself still uses to show their hardware. ​Within our short trip,   we were filmed in Seattle for a Microsoft partner video (by Watts, see their page  for a longer version of the video):

All these were in preparation for the then-top-secret global launch of the New Surface Pro in May.  It's our honor that Panos decided to talk about Expresii on stage himself.  We were also invited to local launches in Hong Kong  and Taiwan.  Later Microsoft also features Expresii on their Surface Pen page  as well as their 'Apps for Windows Ink' collection.  

We are especially proud to be the only team from Asia to be featured in Microsoft's 2017   app partner collage video.  In fact, when we cut out the parts, we are surprised that Expresii bits  total 30 seconds, or 1/4 of the  2-min. collage's length!  And notice that the other app partners include giants like Adobe, Autodesk & Corel.   

In Expresii, not only are we able to develop advanced software technology that even giant competitors can't make, we are also promoting the good side of our culture through technology. Expresii is not a me-too app. We have our own visions and we try our best to implement them even given limited resources.

Expresii  is being developed as a painting app and we didn't expect it to be used more and more  in animation.   ​It was even  used in this 2017 TED-ed  Animation .  We may be a bit quiet lately but we are far from being lazy. We just can't wait to show you new stuffs when they are ready. We are really grateful to our partners and friends for making things happen. We  look forward to more industry   collaboration and new possibilities in 2018!           (ﾉ´ヮ´)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

This is mainly    for those from China only.  If you're from other parts of the world please just buy directly from Gumroad or Win10 Store.

好消息，现在Expresii已经开始支持微信支付，支付宝，银联等购买方式。想買的可以直接這個鏈接購買Expresii 的 Win32版，但先請確定你能用且用的開心才好買啊，因為退款比較麻煩  :P    謝謝支持！

進入Avangate 的畫面是這樣的，下面有可選 微信支付，支付宝，银联等的：

買完之後，會發給你一個License Key，之後也是要用‘防火牆模式’註冊的啊。
​
如果您的機器，有較好的GPU，跑Expresii 是通常都有100+FPS（在視窗頂的title bar 可以看到FPS），那就應該會用的挺爽的（intel 的 GPU現在比較多會出些error）。

其實不用註冊也可試用，只是不能存儲而已。如果您有用Win10，也可到 Windows 10 Store (应用商店) 试用（30天，能存儲）或购买Expresii 的Store 版。

p.s. 以後不用怕淘寶代購會刷黑卡了。

We thank Mark Lam of CGVisual.com  for introducing us in the session 'CG in China' at  SIGGRAPH ASIA 2017, held last month in Bangkok, Thailand.

Our new  ink pusher tool was shown to public  for the first time during   the session.   Here is the video again:

As you can see, you  get  just-right amount of control and things stay like water-based paint with details. 

We can't wait to try it on big devices like the Surface Studio.   ​Ψ( ﾟ∀ﾟ)Ψ