Cannot smooth brush edges?

[Resonance]

Hello!

I'm using a cintiq 24hd and recently started using affinity photo and affinity designer. I can't seem to get smooth strokes for any brush I've tried so far; default, custom, messing with my own settings. They all have rough edges on every stroke. I've tried searching around for tutorials that address brush settings and rough strokes, but I think maybe my search terms just aren't strong enough to find helpful resources?

Here's some comparisons between Autodesk Sketchbook and Affinity on the same cintiq. 

All screen shots are at 100% zoom.

Thank you for any guidance!

[stokerg]

Hi Resonance and Welcome to the Forums,

I've just tested our Cintiq 13 Pro and got the attached results.

The red stroke was the closest i could get to a rough edge BUT i had to use a textured brush, so thats to be expected as it's part of the texture.  The rest of the strokes had been made with the basic brushes. 

Couple of things to check, make sure you have the latest drivers installed for the Cintiq and also under the Preferences of Affinity  on the Performance tab make sure View Quality is set to Bilinear (Best Quality) and not Nearest Neighbour. 

[Resonance]

I've got bilinear selected and all drivers on my system updated, I'm still getting jittery edges on my brushes. The only smooth edge I can manage is with the stabilizer turned on, which makes it a bit too difficult to sketch naturally.  

Red strokes were done with my mouse while using my primary monitor rather than the cintiq, as a comparison. 

[SrPx]

What I have found is :

- For the type of edgy contours that refers to pixelation, more than actually a non jittery line, for that use a brush that is in the basic brushes, a round basic one which has very feathered contours, can't remember the name. I'd do that or use another setting the brush hardness at 0%. Or both things.

- For line smooth in the sense of averaged, having no JITTER, or line wobbling, yep, the line smoothing fixes it, but use a LOW value, and I believe Window mode (is rope or window mode, in the top bar) works better. Also, Are you working in a very high resolution canvas, in fully zoomed out ? If so, only a strong setting of smoothing will work. I usually zoom a bit (not necessarily a lot) for inking. And set a slight value of smoothing (line stabilizing). While sketching, is not such of an issue,so, I sketch in full canvas size, which imo, is the important thing.

- Be sure that your brush is not having a TON of spacing ( a setting in the brush properties). It seems to me maybe several of your strokes are with brushes with very high value of spacing. Which produce the effects of a a worm formed by spheres, instead of a line.

- The machine DOES have a lot to do with it. very low end machines will suffer a tone more issues (or multiplied effect) than in just low end but just modern machines. I can now paint and ink in beta 1.7 quite comfortably. (but an old i3 or i5 is worse than my arcane pc (in my sig.))

- License owners private beta Photo 1.7.x works a lot better in brushes, also, consider that.