Brush spacing / rotate / scale

Matthew Woehlke mw_triad at users.sourceforge.net
Tue Nov 13 20:22:16 CET 2007


Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> On Tuesday 13 November 2007, Matthew Woehlke wrote:
>> Valerie VK wrote:
>>> Since Krita has line tool, it doesn't need to take up the Shift
>>> key for straight lines like with Gimp. So how about assigning it
>>> to this? It is "smoother" in terms of resizing than pressing a
>>> key several times.
>> Line drawing (and more frequently, H/V constraint) with 'shift' is one
>> PS feature I find very useful, that Krita doesn't have :-(.
> 
> Why is that more useful or usable than drawing a line with the line tool?

Short answer:
It's disruptive to workflow (at least, to people coming from PS and/or 
GIMP). It also loses the ability to repeatedly overstroke parts of an 
H/V path. Also, at least in Krita 1.6.1 there is no real-time update as 
in PS or GIMP.

Long answer:
The PS/GIMP model cleanly segregates drawing into two aspects: tool 
function, and stroke placement model. All brush-like tools support the 
'shift' stroke placement modifier for drawing lines, polylines, and 
constraining to an H/V path.

Krita does not make this clean separation. We have a number of 
brush-like Tools (brush, eraser, blur, etc) that support exactly one 
stroke placement method. In addition, we have two "tools" that impose a 
different stroke placement method but only support a small subset of 
Tools. Instead of a consistent and complete hierarchy, we have two 
independent "tool trees", one that starts with function and only 
supports one method of stroke placement, and one that starts with stroke 
placement and provides only a subset of functionality.

Hopefully this is better in 2.0 (which I haven't had a change to play 
with, yet) with flake, but the line/polyline/bezier tools in 1.6.1 feel 
like a poor imitation of PS's paths, which is what they should have been 
in the first place. Non-real-time paths to me only make sense if they 
are persistent and editable, which these tools fail at (beziers at least 
are editable but not persistent, and also cannot be filled).

Use case:
In PS, I use polyline stroke placement often when masking images; this 
tends to give me better results than pure freehand drawing. In Krita, 
this is impossible because the polyline tool does not paint until I am 
done, so that a: I am constantly guessing what I am actually drawing, 
and b: in order to see what I have drawn, I have to "forget" my last 
point. Plus now I am constantly changing tools.

-- 
Matthew
Me: wtf?? "#warning This is temporary since Dec 2000". Seven-year 
"temporary" code?
Mathieu Chouinard: Sounds like the correct definition of temporary :)



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