Raster Sub-Pixels drawing ?

[Alon Dan]

I really like using the Rasters drawing and animating in OpenToonz but I noticed something that bothered me and wondered if there is a solution hidden or a feature that need to be added in the future?

The minimum brush size of Raster size is 1.0 and if you want to use even thinner outlines (like pencil scanned) it's impossible to go under 1.0 brush size like Sub-Pixels.

I know it's possible to get thinner results using the vectors and even change the thickness, but I'm interested in pure rasters.

In TVPaint Animation you can go to 0.1 if you like and I used 0.5 for a really Pencil-Like thin brush (using their pen brush).
So brush size set to  0 to 0.5  is what I like (with pressure) so the maximum is 0.5 and I really like the outlines. 

QUESTION:

Is it possible to change the Raster drawing brush to sizes smaller than 1.0 like in Toon Boom Harmony and TVPaint Animation software?   (Again: in pixels / raster level and not vectors)

I would like to know how to do it, maybe I missed something?

Thanks ahead! 

[Rodney Baker]

I believe we can but don't see the option for it.

I wonder if the thickness setting it a unit based on DPI.

If it is you could very likely increase the DPI of your scene and then you can effectively decrease the size of your brush/pencil units that way.

That's something of a workaround pending a better answer arriving from those who know better.

The key here appears to be that the 1.0 setting is a unit but it's not clear to me at this point what that unit is relative too.

In most cases we'd look for a setting of cm or mm in our preferences and adjust that as necessary.

[Alon Dan]

Back in the days... the way we used to "work around" the resolution for extra thin emulated-pencil like in pure tradigital paperless was to work with double the resolution and render in half.

The thing is that I would like to work in Real-Time, and WYSIWYG "what you see is what you get" without preview every time to see if I like or not, just like I mentioned in TVPaint and Harmony these days.

I also believe there is a way the developers will be able to tweak this and let us draw in maximum of 0.X 

I hope to see this sometime in the future it will be very nice to get a thinner brush for the raster levels.  :)

[Herbert123]

The view quality while drawing in Toonboom and Toonz at higher resolutions and zoomed out is quite terrible. I do my inking in ClipStudio EX, which has brilliant real-time render quality. And the latest version does frame-by-frame animation as well, making it (for me) the best choice for inking. And yes, it supports decimal values. Incredibly enough the "normal" drawing view quality in ClipStudio is on par or better than TB and Toonz' preview.

The latest Krita alpha with animation also does a tremendous job - and Krita allows you to draw with 0.05 px brushes, if required :-P

[Alon Dan]

True, both the zoom in and out (anything else from 100%) in OpenToonz looks really bad and hard to work with, hopefully this will also be improved in the future.

I never heard of ClipStudio before I should check it out, I did play with Krita but never for animation because it was a long time ago and the animation was not even built in, I should also check it out. thank you for the great tips! :)

The thing is that I would LOVE (and I have a feeling that I'm not alone here) that OpenToonz will give us most of the tools we need so we won't need to go to other software at all, that's why I really enjoyed Mirage (the old version of TVPaint) because I could do anything (beside Vectors but I don't care about vectors unless it's a specific commercial project that it's needed.)

Hopefully, OpenToonz will have a better, more dynamic drawing brush and... yup, I would love to see a better Zoom quality because it is really bad compare to the others, but I'm not here to complain I'm already in love with OpenToonz... it's too late for me.  ;)

[Herbert123]

ClipStudio's drawing feel is excellent - much better than Photoshop or most other illustration and drawing software that I know of. It is, of course, a personal preference, but still. And the vector tools are super: one of my favourite tools is the "redraw vector line", which allows you to redraw existing segments of a vector line.

And the eraser of the Wacom pen removes overshoots automatically - another neat feature. Very simple to clean your inks with. Get the EX version, which includes full length animation - the other version, while only $49, only support 24 frames long animations.

Download the trial here:
http://www.clipstudio.net/en

Sample files are here:
http://www.clipstudio.net/en/dl

[liumx...@gmail.com]

From the source code I've seen, OpenToonz uses really old style of OpenGL. It's fixed pipeline based, mixed with CPU rasterization.
It even uses evil glDrawPixels() to draw images. This is bad for performance. It may explain the brush lag reports.
If they can transit to modern way OpenGL and use shaders, it's easy to improve zooming quality by writing a custom sampling algorithm.

[Alon Dan]

Thanks Herbert it sounds really cool I will give it a try.  :)

But still, I hope that OpenToonz will improve their quality drawing tools in general with the newest OpenGL support so it won't stay any longer.