Curves are lumpy around the nodes.

[Fonce Falooda]

Hey! Just got ASP 11, started drawing in it, and noticed that the line thickness is slightly bulbous around the nodes. Is there a way to alleviate this? It's like drawing with pea pods!

The shapes themselves are fine, but the line thickness isn't as smooth as I think it should be. I'm betting there isn't a fix for this, so maybe add this to the wish list for 11.1?

[hayasidist]

what do you have set in Freehand options? e.g. pen pressure for line width / percent variability / tapered ends / smoothing?

[GCharb]

Strokes are made to create an outline around shapes, they are not meant to be looked at very closely.

If you need such big stokes, maybe you are best making them as shapes, then you would have total control of the way they look.

You could also put in more control points, would help you get smoother strokes, then play with curvature (c) and stroke width (w).

[Víctor Paredes]

Most of your curves can be done using only 3 points. That will give you smoother line-width variations for them.

[funksmaname]

unless I'm missing something, I'm not sure why no-one has mentioned the line width tool? you can set the width on individual points, including the bends...

[Fonce Falooda]

Hey! Thank you all for responding!

Haya and Funksma - I did technically draw it in, and had smoothing on (over halfway), but the lines are HEAVILY dealt with after the fact, with the curve and line width tool. This is the closest I could get it to what I'm looking for (non-bulbous), without adding a mess more points, which would give me more to worry about later.

Charb - I understand what you're saying -shapes instead of lines- but that adds another step to the process: sculpting my "lines" with shapes. If I could get the blob brush to draw like a normal brush (taper at the ends), that might be the answer. (Just tried drawing with the Blob Brush, and it's decent, but when you intersect lines, stuff moves. I'm sure it's supposed to do this, though. It's probably just not meant to be "drawn" with.)

Victor - I used the fewest points I thought I could get away with and be able to animate it later. It's supposed to be a mouth, and I was hoping to use the morphing on its switch layer, which would necessitate bending this thing into a bunch of shapes that three points per line wouldn't permit.

Thanks again, everyone! I am desperately trying to migrate over from Flash, and the new Frame by Frame feature sold me. You couldn't do rudimentary rough storyboards (easily) before. But I'm still hung up on the line quality (and it should really be easier than having to sculpt shapes for every line).

I'm attaching a pic of the line quality I'm looking for, and it seems like ASP is SO close. How tough do you think it would be to tweak the way that the points display line thickness? Each point would need to take the entire stroke into account, not just itself. They've already been tweaked once! "Modern" vs "Legacy" curves! Now how about "Post-Modern" curves?

[GCharb]

Blob could be used to do that style, especially if you are using a tablet, as it is very close to a regular brush, with the added benefit of being able to tweak points, this style can easily be achieved in AS.

Just uncheck merge strokes, and lines wont be merged together.

[Greenlaw]

That's looks great!

I agree with GCharb about the Blob brush. I used to be somewhat critical of both the Freehand and Blob tools back in ASP 10 but I'm finding they are much more practical now. Part of issue was that it took me time to understand and adapt to drawing with them, but they are also just better now in 11.

One thing I can still pick on is the lack of a native Point Eraser tool--like the one DKRoot made for his custom FBF drawing tools in 10. The Point Reduction tools is good at what it's designed for but it's just not the same thing as a Point Eraser. Most of the time, I want to be specific about which points to remove from a path.

G.

[synthsin75]

Ah, PO'DCast. Great taste, man.

[Fonce Falooda]

Charb and Greenlaw- I gave the blob brush another shot, and it's still a little rough, though it might be my current working configuration. My Cintiq is attached to a computer running XP (I know), so I installed Anime Studio on my Surface Pro 3. And since ASP doesn't like the n-trig pen, I have a little Wacom touch/pen tablet hooked up. It runs fine mostly, but it might be screwing up my brush strokes a little. Gonna get a new system for the Cintiq sooner than later, though, so I'll report back.

One possible side-step solution is to throw a scruffy Brush on the stroke. It camouflages the pea lumps. I might do that until my "Post-Modern Curves" update comes.

Synth- Hey! Yeah, that show fell apart too soon. I did a bunch of work on the stupid cover, too, for the show to last like 6 episodes! Dennis Miller is surprisingly hard to caricature! Back when, when he had the hair, it was probably much easier. Now he's just a white guy with short dark hair!!! I HAD to include the goatee. It was the only way to make him recognizable!

Meanwhile, if you haven't listened to "Reasonable Doubt", I recommend it. It's like Loveline, except for legal stuff (and it has a similar quality of cover art ).

[Greenlaw]

ASP doesn't like the nTrig? This the first I heard of it. Just curious but what does it do exactly? I know there are other Surface Pro 3 users in these forums so hopefully they will confirm or have suggestions shortly. If ASP is not compatible with nTrig, that's a very serious issue and it should be reported to the developers.

I had thought about getting a Surface Pro 3 last year but decided to hold out until the Wacom Cintiq Companion 2 was released this spring. In the beginning I had some issues with ASP on this Cintiq-based computer but it's working fine now. (I'm writing an article about that for our website.)

I was doodling in ASP last night on this computer and here are some observations:

- When using the Freehand tool, I guess I do see some of that 'chunkiness' you describe in my lines. This is motly when Smoothing is set too low. Of course, setting it too high makes it a little difficult to draw accurately. The setting that's working best is around 3 or 4 (the first tick being 1). I'm sure this will vary depending on what I'm drawing.

- The Freehand tool does tend to generate a lot of points. It seems to generate fewer points the higher your Smoothing setting. You can try swiping over the most dense part of the curve with the Point Reduction brush. If you're too aggressive with it, you'll get the chunky lines back. You could manually delete specific points, if it becomes critical. (That's were a real Point Eraser would come in handy.)

- If you're used to working with bezier curves, remind yourself that the ASP curves are NOT bezier curves. Seeing more points on a curve than you would in, say Adobe Illustrator, is normal for ASP. This used to make me nuts because I started using Illustrator way back in version 1.0 when 1MB was considered a 'ton of RAM', so it's been drilled into the me that I should always minimize the number of points. However, in the case of ASP, I've learned it's not necessary to obsess that much over the number of points.

- When drawing really huge images with super-thick lines, the chunky edges do seem more noticeable. In this case, I would probably plot the curves by hand to optimize the curve shapes using the Curvature tool. That was basically how I simulated the thick and thin brush style from my Brudders webcomic for Scareplane. That was okay for Brudders but depending on the drawing style and complexity of lines, I can see how it could get tedious though.

- In that case, as suggested by GCharb, the Blob Brush might be a better way to go. But this probably depends on how you intend to rig and animate the lines. Lines drawn using 'blobs' tend to be harder to edit than 'edges only' lines created by the Freehand tool.

I know this doesn't completely solve the issue your seeing but hopefully it helps.

G.

[synthsin75]

Synth- Hey! Yeah, that show fell apart too soon. I did a bunch of work on the stupid cover, too, for the show to last like 6 episodes! Dennis Miller is surprisingly hard to caricature! Back when, when he had the hair, it was probably much easier. Now he's just a white guy with short dark hair!!! I HAD to include the goatee. It was the only way to make him recognizable!

Meanwhile, if you haven't listened to "Reasonable Doubt", I recommend it. It's like Loveline, except for legal stuff (and it has a similar quality of cover art ).

Yeah, it's a shame about PO'DCast. Haven't listened to Reasonable Doubt yet (mostly because I dislike iTunes), but you prompted me to go find it available on PodcastOne, so thanks for that. BTW, great caricatures. Let me know if you ever need any help animating/rigging anything Carolla-related in AS.

[Fonce Falooda]

Greenlaw- I'm not sure if it's an issue with ASP, or just the nature of using a non-Wacom pen on a tablet, but I'm getting crazy lollipop lines. It feels like the system can't keep up with the speed I'm drawing, and I'm not drawing that fast.

I'm definitely getting a "can't keep up" feel in ASP on the Surface that I don't get in Photoshop. It's like it's not prepared for the new line to happen, even if it's the first one. Then after a couple, it realizes what it's doing and starts catching them, but the first couple are ridiculously gloppy.

And I'm blaming the n-trig pen/drivers because the second I hook up my little intuos touch/pen tablet, it draws fine. And the n-trig pen draws fine in Photoshop, so I just figured it was an incompatibility between n-trig and ASP. (Yes, I've been installing and uninstalling the appropriate drivers to test each configuration. )

Here's a pic of my lollipops. All the globs are at the starts of the lines, and that one long straight one is where it didn't register any other information than when it started and stopped. Also notice how a couple of the lines are stiff for the first part, as it struggles to record the line.


My primary concern, though, is still my dream of "Post-Modern Curves", because I could just draw slower. Plus, there's always gonna be a fair amount of tweaking to the points after the fact. But far more importantly, I'm eventually gonna get a different computer to hook up to my Cintiq, so this whole "ASP on a Surface" thing will be moot.

Still, I'm curious if this is just me (due to something weird I did to my Surface - I'm running real Intel Graphics Drivers, not the Official Surface ones), or if no one else has spoken up yet.

And I had no idea how she got a plane all to herself until the very end. Nice.


Synth- Hey! Thanks! I will absolutely keep you in mind if I start something up and run into any trouble. Might not be for a bit, but there's something that's been screaming at me to draw it.

Also, I gave up on iTunes years ago. Using MusicBee on my computer and Podcast Addict on my phone (Android). Just have to track down the rss feed for a show every once in a while for MusicBee, but otherwise it's wonderful!

[Greenlaw]

Greenlaw- I'm not sure if it's an issue with ASP, or just the nature of using a non-Wacom pen on a tablet, but I'm getting crazy lollipop lines...

Wow, that does look very wrong. You should submit the pics with detailed explanation to the developers. They might not be aware of the issue and I'm sure they can fix it. There's info for where to submit bug reports here: How to Submit Bug Reports

Still, I'm curious if this is just me (due to something weird I did to my Surface - I'm running real Intel Graphics Drivers, not the Official Surface ones), or if no one else has spoken up yet.

The graphics driver shouldn't have anything to do with it. FWIW, my Wacom Companion is using Intel Iris 6100 graphics, and I've updated the drivers twice using installers from Intel's website. Display wise, it works fine here. You're probably right about the issue being nTrig incompatibility but I can't confirm that here. Hopefully somebody else here can.

And I had no idea how she got a plane all to herself until the very end. Nice.

Thanks. And good luck with everything.

G.

[djwaterman]

Hi, I just attempted a re-trace of your artwork with the vector lines with stroke in ASP, the red is my vectors on top of your originals.



I think it is pretty close, remember it's not just line thickness, you can also adjust curvature.