Some thoughts about improving quality of brush strokes

[akira]

I noticed an interesting behavior when painting very big canvas in photoshop on my laptop.

It was a 6kx6k RGB canvas and I was painting with size 500 dot bitmap brush, it's way larger than the canvas my laptop can handle.

Each stroke lagged badly, but they still followed the drawing path of my mouse very well. That caught my eyes.

Same situation in 3DC will cause straight line between start and end point of stroke. And I don't think cubic interpolation is a good solution to this, it just take more calculation and make things slower.

Then some words showed up in my mind:

Mouse buffer! (or stroke buffer whatever)

I guess PS samples the mouse/pen information and stores them into a buffer first, then apply strokes according to that buffer instead of the mouse/pen information at current time.

So that no matter how laggy the system are, this buffer still store enough information for a good stroke.

I think maybe this buffered method will help 3DC too.

Regards,

akira.

[Jokermax]

sounds like Soft Stroke(Alt+S) *set to something like 500

[akira]

sounds like Soft Stroke(Alt+S) *set to something like 500

Nah

Soft Stroke is still an interpolation, not an input buffer thing.

What will happen when mouse up while painting with soft stroke? It will stop immediately at the middle of the stroke.

But in PS each stroke will be finished to the end. That's what buffer(or cache?) acts like.

akira.

[akira]

I have recorded a video to explain what I mean:

http://screencast.com/t/C0qp7J2G

And I have got additional words to explain the details:

1. There must be an independent thread that handling mouse/pen/keyboard input and stores these information into a buffer at a constant frame rate.

2. The drawing thread applies strokes as soon as the input buffer has data written in it, so that every input can be sampled correctly no matter how laggy the drawing thread is.

hope you understand what I say.

akira.

[haikalle]

That is a very good feature request Akira. And very important for pro users I think.

[Ghostdog]

That is a very good feature request Akira. And very important for pro users I think.

Yeah, sounds like a great idea. Nice thinking.

[3DArtist]

Another vote here, I think this is a really important function. Something that might be useful is to have the brush path drawn between the last updated geometry and the current brush position. This would help guide during heavy painting strokes.

[lc8b105]

Great ideas akira.

[rimasson]

Why not

[als]

Autodesk sketchbook pro is based on this feature, that it just does this drawing well.

So I'm putting my vote in that response is very very important and it's number one feature!

Also what will make 3DCoat the total pro package!

[Nester]

Good idea!I agree!I hope I can see it in 3DC soon!

[rimasson]

1

[akira]

It seems this idea wasn't lucky enough to be implemented.

But I still believe it's a good idea to improve sculpting at higher resolution.

Currently when sculpting at higher resolution like 4mil, we have to slow down our brush to let the cursor catching up with it.

With this buffer thing running, people may still feel laggy at higher resolution when sculpting,

but they will get same look/quality of strokes as those at lower resolution. And they don't need to slow down the painting speed to wait for the cursor.

Regards,

akira.