Digital Rulers & Guides

[lemec]

I've been using TVPaint for pretty much everything but one of the things I've always had trouble with on EVERY drawing program are precise layouts or mechanical designs.

I'm looking for the ability to draw straight lines freehandedly. Using the line tool results in lines of very consistent width. I'd like to be able to constrain the movement of the stylus in a straight line while being able to modulate the pressure of the stroke. The SHIFT key does this, but only in 45° increments.

I'd like to be able to "hover" the stylus over a point on the canvas, hold the SHIFT key down, and then tap once on the canvas to constrain the cursor movement along a line that passes through the point where I held the SHIFT key down and the point where I tapped.

I'm also looking to see if there's a way to draw ellipses and rectangles at an angle. I guess I could script this behaviour into a plugin of mine, but would anyone buy it?

[masterchief]

I would buy it for sure...

additionally, you should have ability to input dimensions or line length.

regards,
William

[lemec]

Come to think of it, an INTUOS tablet has the ability to perform "Dual Tracking", which means it can track up to TWO styluses simultaneously.

Let's call first stylus detected by the tablet the "pencil".

Let's call the second stylus that enters the tablet's detection range the "guide"


If only one stylus is detected, then everything behaves the way it normally should.

If both styluses are detected (although neither is pressed down) then a HUD line(I will call this line the ruler) should appear, passing through both the pencil and the guide and it should extend off past the edges of the screen.

If the guide is held down, then the ruler's angle and position is locked. It should continue to remain locked until the guide is released.
The position where the ruler is locked in place shall henceforth be referred to as the pivot.

While the ruler is locked, the user may draw with the pencil and all strokes will be constrained by the ruler. Moving the guide while the ruler is locked should have no effect on its pivot.

If the pivot is locked and the pencil is lifted away from the tablet so that it is no longer detected, and then the pencil is brought back into detection range of the tablet, then the angle of the ruler should unlock. The ruler can then be rotated around its pivot. Once the pencil begins drawing again, the angle is locked in place. This facilitates drawing radial lines around a fixed pivot.

If the guide is released, then the pivot should unlock, but the angle must remain locked! The pivot may be repositioned to facilitate drawing parallel lines. Then, the user can press the guide to lock the pivot in place again.

To change the angle of the ruler, the guide must be lifted away from the tablet. This should cause the ruler to disappear and the process can be restarted.

What do you think?

[Peter Wassink]

What do you think?

Sounds excellent to me.
I had no idea my Intuos had these possibilities.
But do i need to buy an extra pen? Or could that dustcollecting mouse be made of use for this?

[lemec]

YES! Dual tracking DOES work with additional mice/pucks! Unfortunately, my the wacom_tablet.dll cannot control the position at which lines are drawn. Only Hervé has the power to put that in motion.

It might even be nice to use the mouse as a way to pan/rotate/zoom the drawing. I'm not sure since I don't have a mouse, but I think you can get a twist rotation reading off a mouse.

The Wacom SDK explains the technical aspect of Dual Tracking... Geek Goggles™ ACTIVATE!!!!!

http://www.wacomeng.com/devsupport/ibmpc/gddevpc.html

[ematecki]

The best way to use the mouse is to attach a stencil to it so you can move/rotate and even zoom it,
and paint with the stylus, just like you do with an airbrush in real life.

Unfortunately it seems that the wacom 3 mouse lost the 'heading' tracking ability, at least on MacOSX.
I tried it a year or so ago and only the wacom2 mouse did return a meaningful value for this.
No response from wacom dev support, as usual.
Without rotation all this is pretty useless...

[lemec]

It's possible that the mouse returns values from the Orientation or Rotation structures, but I have no way of testing this because my Cintiq didn't come with a mouse, even though it uses Intuos 3 tracking technology (well, I can kind of see why nobody would use a mouse with a Cintiq ).

Still, I'm very interested in seeing an implementation of Dual Tracking with an additional stylus. A 6D pen would be particularly useful since it reports twist rotation, so a virtual, scalable stencil (like a clear plastic french curve template) could be used. It'd be neat if you could save your own custom vectorized virtual stencils from recorded strokes or beziér shapes.

I'd really love to be able to pan/zoom/rotate the way these guys do it:

http://www.perceptivepixel.com/

[lemec]

And if a person DIDN'T have an extra stylus for dual tracking (to operate the ruler) then perhaps rulers could have a 3 handles on them that appear when the SHIFT key is held down, one in the middle, and two on the sides.

Dragging the center handle would slide the ruler around while keeping the angle locked.

Dragging the side handles would change the angle/position of the ruler.

Double-clicking the center handle would remove the ruler completely.

Maybe rulers could be implemented as an augmentation to TVPaint's already existing guides.

[Peter Wassink]

Maybe rulers could be implemented as an augmentation to TVPaint's already existing guides.

Second!

[djm99001]

I think this is all a great idea.
But how can we talk about stencils, guides, and rulers without referring to ArtRage, which clearly demonstrates that Ambient Design has done some research into ease-of-use? Those stencils, rulers, and guides are very intuitive and simple, with only one stylus.

But I do think that there are cool things that might be done with two cursors (be it mouse/puck & stylus or two stylii)...

-David

[lemec]

Agreed! -- ArtRage DOES have a very realistic implementation of scalable rulers and stencils (it even includes french curve templates), though slightly impractical. ArtRage has a fairly intuitive interface with its rulers (because they're an attempt to simulate real-life rulers), but they take up a lot of screen space and they obscure the underlying image. The ArtRage ruler/stencil system could benefit from some "expert" mode options, such as a "minimal outline" view option, constraints and maybe some hotkeys to just tap two points to snap a ruler across them.