Known Participant

Answered

BRUSH TOOL NOT SMOOTH

Forum|Forum|15 years ago
January 25, 2011
6 replies
44454 views

I have an issue with my Cintiq not drawing smoothly in Flash. I need to sketch incredibly fast and loose. Flash used to work just fine but now it suddenly began drawing really crummy. I posted some examples of flash as well as Photoshop, Sketchbook Pro, and ToonBoom Animate Pro which is another vector graphics tool. I thought the vector graphics may be the issue but that app seems to handle the drawing excellently (now if only it did the other things Flash can do). Here's some examples of how they're looking. It may be hard to tell in these already loose sketches but the performance drop is really a big difference in responsiveness between Flash vs the other apps here:

IMAGE EXAMPLE

http://i1126.photobucket.com/albums/l613/jedoralive/LINEUP.jpg

SYSTEM SPECS

ATI Radeon HD 4870

2x3 Ghz Dual Core Intel Xeon

8GB RAM

4TB HD

Does anyone know why my cintiq is causing flash to draw so poorly? Occasionally photoshop will also do the same 'crumbly edges' thing? Any idea how to fix it?

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer UDESCO

Hi All,

Brush drawing experience has been improved in the latest update - Animate CC 2017.2 (16.2.0.24)

Please try it out and let us know how it works for you.

UDESCOCorrect answer

Participating Frequently

Hi All,

Brush drawing experience has been improved in the latest update - Animate CC 2017.2 (16.2.0.24)

Please try it out and let us know how it works for you.

travisbrainerd

Participating Frequently

For anyone interested, I've logged a bug on current issues with the brush tool accuracy. Please feel free to add to the discussion.

BUG: Flash straightens curves when drawing quickly

P

prodigalmaster

Inspiring

http://imageupload.org/?di=1212983382234

Here is an image showing where the smoothness slider is in flash CS3 for the brush, just incase it is of any use.

Asymetrical

Inspiring

Thanks but I wasnt talking about that Smooth tool. That's for the brush. I meant the Smooth tool that is under Modify/Shape. In CS5 it has been replaced with some crap called the Advanced Smooth tool but when you use it it does nothing to smooth out a pencil or a brush line. Why oh WHY can't they just ADD stuff instead of replacing it with junk? I mean it's kinda stupid... they had a crappy drawing tool and I figured out a way around it so I could use it effectively so what did they do? They KILLED the one thing that actually FIXED drawings! What the heck is THAT about?

P

prodigalmaster

Inspiring

ah right in CS3 I just looked and saw the mooth and straighten tools. What they got rid/messed them up in the new versions? hrm I wonder what else they messed up. Maybe I should just stay with CS3 xD (Adobe, if you're readin this, you lose customers through being stupid and getting rid of or destroying perfectly useful tools, shame on you.)

Y

Ysong_1983

Known Participant

You can use ILLUSTRATOR of Adobe to draw much faster and smoother than Flash. With my experience, I draw my art to ILLUSTRATOR then import it to flash. Before importing to FLASH, you should layered your art properly in ILLUSTRATOR.

RoboSnacksAuthor

Known Participant

Illustrator, Photoshop, Sketchbook Pro, and ToonBoom ALL draw smoother than Flash. BUT they don't have the interface, timeline, nested symbols, or any of the other features that make Flash what it is. Sadly, Toonboom destroyes Adobe when it comes to their Vector Brush tool, but the interface of Flash is otherwise pretty ingenious, flexible, and more intutive than any other app out there.

For a single image or maybe even 10-20 the other apps might cut it, but for 500-2000 sketches at a time, importing drawings between programs is entirely counter-productive. The fact that there are now apps out there which actually have tools that do what Flash claims to do but 1000x better, is embarrassing at best for Flash. That doesn't make me smile. I want Flash to be great, but I can't keep supporting a product that isn't cutting it professionally. It's turning into hobbyists tool in comparison to what else is on the market, at least in terms of generating artwork. The coding is fine, but again - there's also iOS sdk, visual studio, unity, and blooddev C++ for all of that.

L

leoinplano2011

Participant

I definitely agree that your ideal solution would be to get Flash to draw as good as you'd like.. But if that's just not possible, I don't know if you've considered it or not, but maybe a way to get the best of both worlds would be to use a JSFL script to import your hundreds of sketches into the timeline of whatever project you're working on.

You could author your artwork in whichever program did the best, and then 1-click on a special custom panel in Flash could bring all the sketches over and position them on the timeline, putting each one on a new frame, etc., whatever you needed it to do.

Not ideal, but it seems a lot of problems like this in Flash aren't so much "Figure out how to get the tool to do what you want", but "Figure out how to get the tool to do as close to what you want as possible with as little fuss as possible."

Asymetrical

Inspiring

I don't know if this helps but Flash will draw signifigantly faster, smoother and generally better if ithe drawing you're doing is not nested inside a symbol. Granted, Flash still bites at drawing but the older CS3 was a beautiful program and Adobe has been destroying it revision after revision. I can't imagine what they'll ruin is Flash CS6!

To the guy who said that Flash isn't a drawing tool, then why on earth does it have a brush tool and a pencil tool? Of COURSE it was meant to draw with and that should not be an excuse fopr Adobe to shake their head and say oh well... use a competitor's program. I can't imaigne it's that complicated for them. Infact they've recently made it even harder with the joke tool known as Advanced Smooth which effectively does nothing. I used to be able to smooth my wiggly lines out with the Smooth tool, but since Adobe has borked that tool, I can't A small company like Toonboom has beaten the crap out of them with vectors and it's high time Adobe did something about it isntead of wasting it's time fighting with Apple.

RoboSnacksAuthor

Known Participant

Smoothing doesn't mean turning a box into a circle, but that's basically what the brush tool does. If you're using the brush tool in Flash, and want to sketch a simple box they say "Well, we can't do that - but you get a choice between a wobbly box, or a 'smoothed' box...which is just a circle. With other much smaller companies schooling them on this - I expect a LOT more from their upgrades and is precisely why I refuse to upgrade from CS3. I think a lot of the tools in Flash are still holdovers from the days when a 56K modem was a big concern but that was 2000. It's over a decade later and other companies are picking up the slack where they've grown content, and outdated. I hope that trend changes. I hope they listen to the customers and create what we ask for, not simply justify and make excuses for what's already there. No more 'Hand me downs' upgrades please.

RoboSnacksAuthor

Known Participant

You can't really see the crumbly edges. Photobucket shrinks the image above ^. Here's a better link for the image:

http://web.me.com/jedoralive/techSupport/CINTIQ_21UX.html

A

Anonymous

Flash is not necessarily made for drawing... I mean you could use Flash, and I agree it does have bad quality for drawing! In the Brush tool you can adjust the smoothness of your line. But I believe Photoshop or Illustrator would do a much better job.

Another solution, buy a drawing tablet($100-$2000)! Much better for drawing in any program!

RoboSnacksAuthor

Known Participant

I use Photoshop, Painter, or other apps when I need a single drawing to look great, however when it comes to thousands of sketches at a time, quick and dirty, I've found after a decade of working with all of these apps that for my own purposes, there are too many creative and efficiency benefits to sketching in flash to justify staying at work an extra 6 hours saving individual files, and clicking layer eyeballs off and on. Still...the tradeoff is the drawing tool for Flash looking like cricket draw threw up on your screen. When I saw the vector brushes used in Toon Boom, I was amazed that such a thing could be accomplished without being bitmap, and thought that might fix it - but that apps interface is like someone took Flash and removed all the parts that worked, and added a nice brush. I love flash, I've used it since version 1, and this is honestly my only complaint - but it's a pretty important one for me. It's like having a ferrari with a steering wheel made of soft play-dough. I REALLY hope they take a serious crack at least enhancing if not overhauling their brush tool.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded