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Adjustable smoothing of pencil and brush tool


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Though it mostly does a good job, the smoothing of pencil lines is a bit too much sometimes, e.g. when I try some calligraphic lettering using the Wacom tablet. The different line thickness resulting from pressure sensitivity will be taken out after completing the stroke - interestingly the longer the line the "flatter" it will end up. This can be reproduced by comparison of drawing one oval with pressure on the downstroke and drawing a long spiral with pressure on the downstrokes - the thicker line is retained in the single oval, but gets mostly lost in the spiral. It would help if this were adjustable so I wouldn't loose what I see while drawing. Trying to replicate Spencerian script (not to speak of Copperplate) is rather impossible (especially Spencerian script can be approximated with a 2B pencil).

 

What I'd really wish for was a tool that replicates the behaviour of a real flexible nib where the tines open up on pressure, which is somewhat like drawing two lines at once while the space between them is filled with ink - no program I know of can do this in a realistic way, not even Painter (see here for an explanation what this is all about). This would also be a godsend for all the Manga artists I guess.

This might even give a unique position feature for AD, but probably needs quite a lot of research and even new algorithms.

 

Here's an "O" and a spiral where I used similar pressure on downstrokes - notice how the spiral doesn't reflect this any more after finishing the stroke.

post-8898-0-61926500-1428855727_thumb.png

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I wonder somewhat that there's no reply yet - didn't I make the issue clear enough?

It might even be a bug, since long lines like in the spiral loose nearly all of the thickness variation that was still there while drawing it.

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Hi Achim63,

There's already some threads discussing this subject. Some related to how the brush smooths out the path after it has been drawn and the possibility of adding a user-controllable pressure smoothing level, others related with a bug (a blob that appears at the beginning of the path/stroke with certain settings) etc. We are aware of those issues. I believe Matt will take a look at them when he gets some time. The latest weeks were kinda busy due to the 1.2 release and new Photo and Designer Betas. Please bear with us while we get there.

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Sorry if I sounded impatient and thanks for the reply. I actually searched for similar discussions in the forum, apparently with the wrong key words. I also experienced those blobs, but infrequently and couldn't reproduce it reliably. Let the devs take their time - better a stable and complete release than some hurried patches that might lead to more problems later.

If I need to, I can always switch to Painter, iDraw, Intaglio and some other apps that I have available, but hope that one day AD will be the first tool to go to for each of these cases - so far I'm pretty happy with the whole user experience and UI of AD.

Working in the software business as QA engineer (though not in the graphics field), I know how difficult it is to please everyone - and AD seems somewhat stuck between the needs of artists and those that like to make technical drawings with exact measurements. I'm sure it will all fall into place eventually, hoping it will lean more towards the artistic direction.

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