Nodekit Weirdness with Wacom Intuos3 6x11 tablet

[Scott_Goff]

The Tagtool setup I just put together for a friend was working fine on
his desktop, with two monitors and a 9x12 Intuos tablet for drawing.
With this setup, regardless of whether or not the drawing window was
maximized, the active tablet area covered all of the visible area in
the drawing window.

Buuuuuut, when we took the show on the road, using an Intuos3 6x11
tablet and a laptop with a 600x800 pixel projector, the tablet's
active area only covered a rectangular island in the middle of the
drawing window, rather than mapping to the entire drawing area. We
also tested this without the projector, with the drawing window on the
laptop screen, and the same strange mapping occurred. No amount of
fiddling with the Wacom driver would resolve the problem.

And another couple bits of weirdness: on this laptop (not mine, so not
optimized or kept up well), i had to install the driver for the Wacom
fresh. So, I chose the most recent XP driver, and this gave perfect
pen tracking in Windows, but once Nodekit grabbed the pen input, the
cursor had a lot of jitter to it, not tracing a straight line, but
rather a jagged line. Also, the distance of the pen from the tablet
had a very strange effect on the location of the drawing cursor. As
the pen tip moved closer to the tablet surface, the cursor would move
diagonally up and to the right. When the pen was in contact with the
surface, the cursor moved as directed by the pen. It seemed like
Nodekit had trouble tracking the pen location when the pen wasn't in
direct contact with the tablet.

I tried installing an earlier version of the XP Wacom tablet driver
(6.08-4a), and that solved the jittery pen problem, but left me with
the bad cursor tracking vs. distance from tablet, and with the strange
mapping. Any ideas how to solve these problems?

Cheers,
Scott

[Scott_Goff]

...in fiddling around trying to get things to work as expected, I
tried all the other recent Wacom tablet drivers, and they all gave the
same results (bad cursor tracking when the pen is hovering or tilted
at an angle). However, when I tried Nodekit 0.7.0, the Intuos3 6x11
tablet mapped successfully to the whole drawing window. In this
version I still had the same problem with tracking the cursor,
though.

-Scott

[Scott_Goff]

Bump! Any ideas about this problem? My friend's Tagtool/Nodekit 0.7.1
is working fine with his 9x12 Intuos usb, but still highly frustrating
with my 6x11 Intuos3, due to the problems listed above. Help?


Cheers,
Scott

[samth]

Hi Scott,

> Bump! Any ideas about this problem? My friend's Tagtool/Nodekit 0.7.1
> is working fine with his 9x12 Intuos usb, but still highly frustrating
> with my 6x11 Intuos3, due to the problems listed above. Help?

Your tablet should work fine with Nodekit 0.7.1,
since all the Intuos tablet (Intuos, Intuos2, Intuos3) share the same
driver.

I wondered if this have something to do with the problem,
I noticed that your tablet have the odd size (6x11),
unlike the 3:4 (9x12) tablet, which is exactly the same proportion as
standard display monitor(15", 17").

Have you looked into the Mapping Preference Setting after you
installed the tablet driver?
Just a guess!

sam

[Scott_Goff]

Hi Sam!

Yeah, I tried changing the mapping settings in the driver; I tried
landscape, mapping to only one display rather than mapping to the
combined screen area of both displays (monitor and projector), forcing
proportions, not forcing proportions...basically every setting I tried
produced the same strange mapping and strange pen tip locating errors
(when the pen was hovering over the tablet surface, not when tapping
or drawing; then the tracking is good).

I think there must be some differences in the way Nodekit 0.7.1 and
0.7.0 deal with the tablet node; as I said in a previous post, on
0.7.0, the tablet area mapped correctly, with full tablet coverage of
the drawing window. And, the dimensions of the tablet listed in the
tablet node are different on 0.7.0, too. So the only conlusion I can
come to is that the tablet node in 0.7.1 isn't detecting the tablet
size correctly.

As for the cursor not tracking correctly when hovering, that problem
is present in 0.7.0 and 0.7.1; none of the data in the tablet node
gives any hints as to the cause of this problem. However, I suspect
that the tilt (azimuth) control is the cause, but I have no idea on
how to debug and solve the issue myself.

Hopefully once the development situation for Nodekit and its successor
has settled down, one of the devs can take a look at this? I think the
popularity of the wide tablet size is going to grow with the
popularity of widescreen flat panel monitors and widescreen capable
projectors (same aspect ratio), so the problem certainly won't be
going away...

Anyhow, thanks for the suggestions, Sam!

Best,
Scott

[samth]

Hi Scott,

>... I think there must be some differences in the way Nodekit 0.7.1 and

> 0.7.0 deal with the tablet node; as I said in a previous post, on
> 0.7.0, the tablet area mapped correctly, with full tablet coverage of
> the drawing window. And, the dimensions of the tablet listed in the
> tablet node are different on 0.7.0, too. So the only conlusion I can
> come to is that the tablet node in 0.7.1 isn't detecting the tablet
> size correctly.

I have to say that I agree with you.

>However, I suspect
>that the tilt (azimuth) control is the cause, but I have no idea on
>how to debug and solve the issue myself.

You might be right about this!
After some further research, I found this:

Here are the comparison that I got from default Drawing.tagproj (0.7.0
and 0.7.1)
with the same Tablet connected to the Laptop.
Altitude
0.7.0 = -600
0.7.1 = 530
Azimute
0.7.0 = 900
0.7.1 = 2200
all the other values are the same.
The values are only the output so I'm not able to change the values in
the Tablet Node!

I used to have the same problem with you with my laptop. I have Wacom
Graphire4 (4x5).
I had no problem running 0.7 with the tablet at all.
And I was not able to use Wacom Graphire4 with Nodekit 0.7.1--
intermediate release.
When I drew a line, the line would shown up few seconds later (some
lag, which is really annoying)
So I went back to 0.7, which is only good for a demo, and can only be
saved as a single still.
To solve the problem, I download the Nodekit sources from the
development page.
(http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~oma-international/nodekit/trunk/revision/
18)

And build the project using Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition
successfully.
I don't know if the Visual Studio Express (2005 and 2008)-- Free
version, will do the job, I'd never tried it!
And I the outcome is great.
I am able to use my Graphire4 with the compiled version of the Nodekit
(I used Nodekit version 18).
without any problem.
So now I am able to record, playback, and edit(outside the Nodekit)
the session on my laptop.

sam

[maki]

Hi Scott -

The tablet area issue - i've come across this a couple of times.
Here's a workaround: Look for the node "CameraFitToContent". In fact
there are two, so choose the one that goes into the Display node, not
the one that goes into the Screenshot node. By editing the Parameter
"Norm" you can resize the Tablet drawing area. Make sure to save the
patch after you found the right value.

The Pen jitter issue - is it the "spikey line" problem? This should be
fixed in the latest release, which is available on SourceForge:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/nodekit/files/
Hope that helps,

maki

[Scott_Goff]

Hi Maki,

Thanks so much for this info...it has totally solved my problem; I can
now arbitrarily resize the ratio between the tablet mapping and the
actual drawing area. Sweet!


Best,
Scott