Welcome to TVPaint Community forums !

Hi, I love using TVPaint it's a great product.
I do have a request or possibly it is something already achievable I'm not sure.

I love to use just the Freehand Stroke to draw and I get very nice thick and thin tapered lines
but when it comes to doing a very close inbetween between two drawings on a slow in or out
it gets much more challenging and I like to use the B-Spline to get accurate line placement.
But because the B-Spline offers no adjustment for pen pressure the line no longer can provide
the necessary taper at the beginning and end of the line I get when I freehand draw.

My solution is to offer a profile for the B-Spline Spline.
It could consist of a profile for size of brush over the length of spline.

You can see what I mean in the image below:
The B-Spline Spline is very similar to the Freehand Stroke. It's just that the beginning and the end
of the spline retains the size of the brush because it doesn't know how I'm applying pressure when
I Freehand Stroke.

photoupload

The benefit of using the B-Spline is fantastic because it offers the ability of accurate line placement
and TVPaints added function of having the line be visible before committing to the line is above and beyond GREAT!
It offers the best of two worlds. That of spline based drawing and Raster based drawing. My proposed added
functionality would make it even better but I don't know if this is something you can implement.

Thanks for looking - ron

You can link the "Size" of the tool to "Fade" and use the profile as you described.
It should work.

EUREKA!
Thanks Fabrice! I feel like a fool.
Love this software.

-ron

This request can be considered a hint that "fade" is not the best name for this connection,
in fact it is misleading...
It needs a name that better covers what it does.

some suggestions:
- Profile
- Profile fade
- Taper profile

I agree with Peter

Peter Wassink wrote:This request can be considered a hint that "fade" is not the best name for this connection,
in fact it is misleading...
It needs a name that better covers what it does.

some suggestions:
- Profile
- Profile fade
- Taper profile

Yes, taper would communicate the idea better than fade .

Fabrice wrote:You can link the "Size" of the tool to "Fade" and use the profile as you described.
It should work.

Using Zorman's profile on the airbrush tool in B-spline mode I don't get the results he shows in his example , which is a tapering at the start , thicker in the middle , and tapering again at the the end of the B-spline stroke ... I get thicker at the start , tapering to a thinner line at the end of the B-spline stroke. What am I doing wrong ?

David,

It looks like, from your screenshot, that you have the brush shape profile set to match his graph, rather than the Size->Fade profile curve.

David

yes, you'll need to open the profile editor under the connection button, in your image the button displays an F (fade)

meslin wrote:David,
It looks like, from your screenshot, that you have the brush shape profile set to match his graph, rather than the Size->Fade profile curve.

Peter Wassink wrote:yes, you'll need to open the profile editor under the connection button, in your image the button displays an F (fade)

Ok, I understand that now . Thank you both for clearing that up for me. (I don't usually customize my brushes much ... I use the default brush tools and the various nice custom ones that I see posted on the forum , but I'm not regularly customizing the drawing tools ) . However, I changed it to match the Fade Profile Editor for the Size > Fade to have the tapering on the ends and I still can't get it to look like Zorman's example in the first post above . I can get the tapering on both ends , but it tapers to a very thin line . Maybe I just need to keep playing with the profile editor , but so far none of the adjustments I make to it are able to duplicate the subtler stroke that Zorman shows in his image .

I had assumed from his response to Fabrice ("EUREKA! " ) that Fabrice's suggestion : "link the "Size" of the tool to "Fade" and use the profile as you described." worked for him to get the results he was after , but I can't get those results on my end .

Maybe I misread the topic, but shouldn't it be placed in Technical support rather than Improvement forum ?

Probably, but here's a profile that makes a taper similar to the one in the screenshot. I "saved the profile" and added a fake .ini extension (it wouldn't let me attach without an extension) that you should remove before you load the profile. If that doesn't work, you could probably just visually recreate it.

meslin wrote:Probably, but here's a profile that makes a taper similar to the one in the screenshot.

Rounded Ends Profile Curve.png

I "saved the profile" and added a fake .ini extension (it wouldn't let me attach without an extension) that you should remove before you load the profile. If that doesn't work, you could probably just visually recreate it.

Thanks , David !

another thing you can do with the curve is to not start and end it at the bottom, that way you control the minimum size of your line.

so if you have a brush size of 4, starting the profile halfway at 50% makes the taper only go down to size 2

Ahhhh sorry I missed the discussion.

D.T. Nethery:
It looks like you got the right help though. Meslin and Peter nailed it.
The last image in my very first post was a mocked up illustration to show what I was trying to achieve not an
actual result. Sorry for the confusion.

As a side note, I can never get all the subtly of the hand drawn line when using pressure to obtain the size of the brush
but that was never the goal. It was mainly to reproduce a taper at the head and tail of a line while using the B-Spline tool.

Elodie:
My original post was meant as a possible feature not realizing it was actually possible to do what i wanted.
Sorry about that.

thanks -zorman