Drawing symmetrical images

Question

Does anyone know of any programs or plugins for photoshop (or gimp, even) to make drawing symmetrical images easier? I am especially looking for the ability to make multiple views, as in a two-surface, three-surface (triangle), four surface (plus sign), five surface (star). Drawing on any one surface would replicate onto each surface

Does such a program exist? I've been checking google, but haven't had any success. I'm not sure exactly what I am looking for.

I'm sure theres one out there, I remember using one back on a windows 95 machine that had a line down the middle. Drawing on one side automatically drew on the other as well.

Currently I'm doing work on one corner, copy/pasting it three times and rotating it. It works, but it's just incredibly tedious. And I don't know of a quicker way than that.

Answer 1

Try playing around with Symbols in Illustrator. You won't get a real-time "drawing here and watching it duplicated there" experience, but you can get easy symmetry.

1. Draw your base shape that you want to work with. You don't have to outline it, but I find it makes the alignment easier. (It will be easy to change later anyway).

   

2. Do whatever rotating & aligning you want. (I'm just making a simple 90° rotated 4-square pattern).

   

3. Double-click any instance of your Symbol to "edit the definition". (This is fancy Illustrator-speak for "change the base art")

   

4. When you are finished editing a Symbol instance, your changes will be automatically applied to all of the other instances of the same.

   

This same workflow could be applied to triangles, squares, whatever.

Answer 2

Just found out that Corel 12 does this.

http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Product/1166553885783#versionTabview=tab0&tabview=tab1

Answer 3

Yes there is its called Manga Studio you can make symmetrical drawings and some other stuff