Smoothing stroke width

[WetDesertRock]

I'm playing around with tracing a doodle and matching the stroke width using the new(ish?) line width tool. I'm noticing that it is very easy to get sharp corners on the stroke (see attached files showing the original drawing, and my traced line).

Spoiler

 

Questions:

• Is there a way to smooth these line widths so they don't come to a corner, but rather gracefully approach it?
• Is there a better way to do this sort of tracing? I'm imagining I could turn these into shapes rather than lines, but I feel like that would take longer. Perhaps if I get the rough outline and then expand the stroke that might help.

[GarryP]

Welcome to the forums @WetDesertRock

The Stroke Width Tool essentially gives you a way to manipulate the Pressure Profile of the Stroke, but in a different way.

The thing you are seeing is, up to a point (pardon the pun), where the node on the pressure profile has a sharp transition.

I’ve never been able to figure out why some of the pressure profile nodes produce ‘curved’ transitions while some produce ‘sharp’ transitions.

It seems to have some relation to the distance between nodes, less distance between nodes makes for a sharper transition, but that’s not always the case in my limited experience of using this functionality.

Also, the distances between the nodes of the curve and the nodes of the pressure profile seem to play a big role in this.

I’ve attached another example (image and document) of where the profile goes a bit weird. (Zooming in and out changes what we can see quite a lot.)

I think all we can do is call attention to this sort of thing and wait for improvements to be made.

I’m pretty sure that this sort of issue has been mentioned in various bug reports and the staff know about it.

Note: There’s no need to ‘hide’ the images if you intend them to be seen by all forum users. (I’m assuming that you did this by accident or you just weren’t sure of how to use the functionality.)

odd-pressure-profile.afdesign