Matt
I am confident that you will find what you want with practice. The reason I say this is that the attached doodle just shows a few variations I got _without_ adjustment of _any_ settings, or changing the angle of my stylus. Seems to me that you will find what you want, it may be tedious getting there, but, boy!, we will watch you fly when you make it!
Good luck and keep us all informed!
All the best,
Adam
Matt Jordan wrote:
Hi bulia,
Thanks for the response. I give my responses after each of yours below.
bulia byak wrote:
On 11/15/05, Matt Jordan <matt@...1296...> wrote:
The inkscape version has two issues I'd like to resolve if possible.
- The lack of line width variation, in particular, the tapering at
the beginning and ending of lines.
So are you using pressure sensitivity? Does it work for you? If yes, what exactly is the problem with tapering lines? Would you prefer a non-linear dependency between pressure and width - for example so that pressure of 0.5 would give a width less than 0.5? Can you describe the ideal pressure/width dependency and in what way Inkscape differs from it?
Yes, pressure sensitivity does work. The trouble was a limited amount of variation given a certain line width setting. (I keep stupidly saying a "lack" of variation, when I actually mean a limited amount - sorry). Changing the mass setting per your tip below seems to have helped a lot with this problem for some reason. Now I can set the line width fairly high and still get a nice taper at the ends. A nonlinear setting, particularly one where I could adjust the level of nonlinearity, might be a cool feature though.
- The shakiness of the lines.
Have you tried increasing Mass? With Mass=0.2, drawing lags behind a bit, but slowly drawn lines are noticeably smoother.
This really helped a lot. Thanks. I'm playing with exact settings. 0.2 gave great smoothness, but the visual lag on screen was throwing me off. I edged it down to 0.08 and I seem to get most of the smoothing benefits with a fairly low lag factor. I think I can learn to work with that.
The two problems kind of go together. The shakiness seems to be caused by the fact that I'm drawing the lines fairly slowly, so relatively lots of nodes are being laid down. If I draw the strokes faster, they are smoother, but then I can't follow my penciled guide drawing as well. I do realize that I can reduce the number of nodes after the fact, thus yielding smoother lines, but this solution is time-consuming and tedious.
Pressing Ctrl+L a couple fimes after each stroke is easy, and does not require switching to another tool.
True. It still feels a little tedious to me, though, especially when I was having to do it with virtually every line. Luckily, thanks to your tip above, I may have to do this a lot less.
Since I'm fairly new at this learning to draw business, maybe the problem will resolve itself as my skills improve.
If that happens, please let us know :)
I hope to eventually do stuff that'll make the Inkscape crew proud! :)
Thanks for the response. This was the kind of stuff I figured I was missing, so thanks for the tips and I'll keep experimenting.
Matt
