Better value slider control

[Peter Wassink]

Can we have more control on the dragging of values using the sliders?

sliders.png (4.29 KiB) Viewed 13035 times

I like the way you can get a more precise result holding Shift key while dragging in a programm like Blender.
The value increase would remain its lineair correlation with the pen movement,
but it would increase 10 times slower while holding Shift, so that it becomes very easy to get a precise value.

[schwarzgrau]

Oh yeah, thats really something which would made adjusting values sooo much easier

[D.T. Nethery]

Can we have more control on the dragging of values using the sliders

I like the way you can get a more precise result holding Shift key while dragging in a program like Blender.
The value increase would remain its lineair correlation with the pen movement,
but it would increase 10 times slower while holding Shift, so that it becomes very easy to get a precise value.

Good idea. That would be useful.

[Peter Wassink]

i was thinking about this again... but this " +Shift = 10 times slower " could be implemented more general, not just limited to the sliders.

but also in the tools... so for panning, setting circles, spline handles, crop tool... etc. etc.
everywhere you'd possibly want to have an option for more precision
It could even be a solution in the much mentioned instance handle problem in the timeline

[Peter Wassink]

and.. regarding the lineairty of brush sizes.. it would probably still make sense to have some function in the increase other then a linear connection.

see image:

Screenshot 2021-03-16 145655.png (62.39 KiB) Viewed 12025 times

as you can see... a lineair increase gives you very few steps in the small brush size range... where you'd typically want more size options.
while at the large side of the spectrum each increase only gives you a marginally bigger brush in terms of surface percentage increase.

(btw those profile are ment to illustrate the increae rate this is somewthing that could stay "under the hood"

or maybe the brush scaling should use a different factor...
instead of increasing the diameter in pixels
increase the surface in percentage; for example every step 25 % bigger

we'd have to figure out what would be a pleasent increase.
But the idea is that you design controls that are sensible for artist using them daily.

Increasing that user experience is where TVPaint can still win a lot.

[Peter Wassink]

Hey Team,
i'd like to point you attention to this again.
please consider the practical needs of animators that want to set the brush size

you generally want to have fine control of small brushsizes,
Maybe you could consider making increase slider be always proportional
so a slow and controlled extending of the slider would keep adding a a fixed percentage to the current size.
now it keeps adding a fixed absolute number of pixels to the radius per sliding distance which makes the increase proportionally smaller and smaller.
so it effectively makes the tuning of your brushsize relatively more precise on bigger bushers and very coarse on finer brush sizes.
Where, in practice the demand would be the other way around.

Because a tiny size change on a very small brush has a massive effect on the way a line looks.

I believe User interface details like these are very important to keep animators on board the software.
and are relatively (no pun intended) easy to do (not sure)

if instead you do for instance a 25 % increase/step, you get to value 10 in aprox. the same sliding distance,
yet with the benefit of having much more control on the finer sizes.

[Dean]

Hello Peter, I will study this question with the team in the coming days

[Peter Wassink]

Cool!
It would be nice to have some input from other users/beta testers on what is the preferred way to control this.

Another option could be to look for speed as a connection for increasing values:
sliding fast: > bigger size increments
sliding slow:> smaller smaller size increments

I'm just mentioning this without thinking it over very deeply, so not sure if that is workable.
But there might be even better solutions or "best practices" to borrow from, i still like that Blender example with the shift key in the O.P.
(check it out, i think it works like a charm)

[slowtiger]

At least that's something one should try.