Stroke quality issue with Wacom

[herbert123]

I work with a Wacom 5 Pro large tablet. Drawing quick lines in AS Pro 11 results in unacceptable strokes. Adjusting the smooth factor does not help at all - the following lines were drawn quickly with a varying smoothing of 0, 1, and 2. Anything over 2, and the line will change too much.



Notice the corners in particular: all over the place.

Now compare with the same stroke I drew in ClipStudio, Inkscape, Krita, OpenTOonz, and Photoline (in no particular order). Some are raster, others are vector.



This makes it almost impossible for me to draw freehand in Anime Studio. And I cannot import vector work from other applications, since AS uses its own particular method to describe curves, and the result is far too many control points, and worse: the shapes more often than not (completely) change form. Which leaves only one option which is to painstakingly adjust the offending points and corners. Which just takes too much time, and I end up animating freehand stuff in other applications.

Can anything be done about this? I can't imagine no-one else encountered this before. Is it just my machine acting up? Or are we limited to mechanical drawing only in AS (shapes, careful placing of strokes and points).

[synthsin75]

Have you tried the point reduction tool or Scripts>Draw>Simplify Curve?

[herbert123]

Thank you for your response.

The point reduction tool either doesn't do anything or will change the shape of the corners into a very different one. Neither tool resolves this, unfortunately. And I feel I should not be forced to fix such a fundamental and basic task - merely drawing freehand!

Surely I am not the first user to notice this issue? Except for Illustrator (which does a very poor job as well), no other drawing/animation application presents me with a similar issue.

As far as import goes, why is it so difficult for the developers to at least get the basic black and white strokes and shapes right? I understand a different curve mathematics is used, but it also makes it very, very hard to use AS in a pipeline working together with other applications. Export is fine, import is terrible.

Apologies for the complaining. It is just that I would love to integrate AS more in my workflow, and the import issues keep popping up again and again. I am aware I ought to draw directly in AS, yet it is missing proper freehand drawing tools (or at least, the quality is not up to snuff). Ergo: can't go left, can't go right, and I hit the proverbial brick wall.

[synthsin75]

I don't know what to tell you. I have no problem drawing in AS, with the freehand tool:


Perhaps your tests are not testing real-world use, where drawing may be more of a sketching nature than these squiggly-line, one-and-done strokes.

[herbert123]

I was thinking more along the lines of inking, where I use relatively quick, long strokes - at least, that is how I ink.

A secondary issue is that the thickness of strokes does not seem to stay put while drawing longer lines with tapering turned on, and does not respond directly to the pressure while drawing.

Well, perhaps it is just me experiencing these issues. I prefer to draw and ink in ClipStudio, and paint in Krita (sometimes Clipstudio).

The drawing and inking feel in CS in particular is wonderful. Perhaps I am just spoiled, because when I try to ink freehand in AS I just cannot control it the way I can in those other applications.

And, as I stated before, it wouldn't be such an issue if I could just somehow get those clean lines imported into AS.

For example, I can export my inks from Clipstudio as high resolution bitmaps, and import and convert those back to beautiful looking vectors in OpenTOonz - and those vectors result in single center paths with the dynamic thickness of the stroke retained and completely controllable. If only we could achieve a similar result in AS it would be fine.

Anyway, I love the animation in AS, it is just that I feel that the drawing (inking) feel and control should be improved, in my personal opinion.

[synthsin75]

Clip Studio, Krita, and Open Toonz were all designed for freehand from the ground up. You say Illustrator does poorly as well, and both Illustrator and AS were primarily designed as vector tools. No software does absolutely everything you may need. I assume you're interested in AS because it is a better animation tool than some of those. That is because in software like Clip Studio and Open Toonz the animation is wholly about drawing. Those developers were forced to spend their time refining the drawing tools. AS is better at animating because its development was focused on faster methods of animating.

That said, the AS drawing tools continue to improve. But I find them more than adequate, and if you really want to save time animating, you may need to adapt your approach to whatever tool best serves that goal. If you can't adapt, then my advice would be to stick with what works for you.

[Greenlaw]

With the most recent version of ASP, I use the new Freehand tool with a large Wacom Cintiq and with my personal Cintiq Companion 2 often with reasonable accuracy.

If you're using pressure sensitivity, you want to disable the taper options--it generally doesn't make sense to use these options with a pressure stylus since they override the pressure effect.

Also, you generally want to keep Smoothing pretty low--I usually don't have it set higher than the second notch if I need my strokes to be accurate. Anything higher than the second notch will automatically smooth (i.e., change) your strokes by design. I find the higher setting is useful for very broad strokes where the smoothing effect can be desirable, but it can really fight you for detailed shapes.

I find the new Simplify command often works fairly well in preserving the original shape but not always. You just have to try and see what happens. What I do find annoying about the tool is that I need to switch to Select Points tool to access it--it really should be available in Freehand mode as well.

Sometimes, instead of using Simplify, I find it much easier to 'erase' the points tool using the Delete Edge tool with Ctrl held down--this makes the tool delete points like an eraser. Unfortunately, the option is only available in the Delete Edge tool even though, like the Simplify command, it should be available while in Freehand mode too.

I like drawing with the Blob Brush tool too, often in combination with the Freehand tool. Some of the same comments apply to this tool.

All that said, my favorite vector drawing tool is Clip Studio Paint EX. It's super accurate and has excellent tools for editing the paths. But it also generates a lot more points than ASP's Freehand tool, so IMO the ASP equivalent tends to be better suited in drawing for animation.