Welcome to Chainmaille Designer, a Windows program intended to make it easier to design, visualize, and construct chainmaille inlay work. By inlay work, of course, we mean graphic designs woven into chainmaille sheet by the use of rings of different colors, whether the different colors are from using different materials, such as copper, aluminum, titanium, and steel or from using similar materials anodized or coated to color them.
The best way to get started with Chainmaille Designer is to download the installer, run the installer on your machine, then to go through the first few sections of the manual ("Chainmaille Designer Concepts" and "Get Me Started!!"). It helps, but is not necessary, to have one or more inlay projects in mind while doing so.
The installer is the file named Chainmaille Designer Setup.msi in the top-level directory of this repository. It installs not only the program but also the users' manual, the release notes, a ring color palette, and lots of chainmaille weave definitions.
When you first attempt to run the Chainmaille Designer Setup file, you'll likely be interrupted by Windows "protecting" your computer, and the only button their interface displays is the "Don't run" button. By clicking on the "More info" link, however, you will gain access to the "Run anyway" button, which is the one you want.
Contributions are welcome, either in the form of bug reports or in the form of pull requests. If you would like to contribute, please also read CONTRIBUTING.md.
This work was orignially developed by Christopher M. Albrecht from 2017 to 2022. CMAlbrecht
This project is licensed under the GNU GPL v3 License - see the LICENSE.md file for details.
No software is produced in a vacuum. This program owes its existence to all who have gone before, a long line of mathematicians and computer engineers, and most especially to all computer programmers and developers of computer languages, beginning with Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace, and continuing through the C lineage left us by Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stoustrup and many others.
This particular work owes much of its form and function to Zlosk, the creator of the original Irregular Grid Painter. Thanks also to those who contributed pattern files and/or features to the IGP: Tawnos for the Trinity weave, Clawe for European 6-in-1, B Pannell for the knit patterns, MaxumX and Leatherwing for the Persian weaves, and Dunedon for the original color counter.
Celtic_Chainman, MusicMan, Zlosk, and TrenchCoatGuy on the M.A.I.L. forum were particularly helpful with earlier versions of the Chainmaille Designer.
Jeremy Cunningham kennebel has made several valuable contributions to the program, including the undo/redo capability.
The implementations of the DEDragonscale and DE-Euro4in1 weaves distributed with this program were almost entirely dependent on the skill and persistence of my wife, Elsa DieLöwin. Without her work, the edge and corner treatments of the weave sheets couldn’t have happened.