Got my hands on an ASUS ProArt Studiobook 16 OLED and was curious if anyone’s found some neat uses for the ASUS Dial beyond the obvious (timeline scrubbing and keyframe skips)?
1 Like
I had this question. So far the dial isn’t working in Blender for me.
I want to use it for adjusting sculpting brush strength and size quickly.
I didn’t think of using it to scrub the timeline because so far I don’t use Blender for animation, but for sculpting and rendering things to make assets for 2D art.
Yep, that’s the same thing I’d like to use it for (brush size). One thing that annoyed me when using it for timeline frame scrubbing, was that it doesn’t move instantly when “stepping” the wheel just one “click” so to speak.
On first turn (one step) it kind of activates. On second turn, it moves one frame. Hard to describe but very annoying.
I think that whole Dial thing is overrated. As well as the laptop itself. It constantly shows the “Plugged in” OSD during performance load while actually plugged in all the time. Using a fresh device, only ASUS own charger … Posted about it here, seems other ASUS users have the same issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/ASUS/comments/171cufq/proart_studiobook_16_frequent_plugged_in_osd/
1 Like
I still haven’t figured out how to set the dial correctly. Somehow I don’t think Asus is going to be very helpful.
I didn’t have the issue with the charging cable. I set the custom button to be ‘ctrl+S’ to save, but it only worked a couple times and then stopped working and disappeared from the menu to set it.
There are enough good features that I’m pleased with the laptop, but some things could work better. An easy way to disable touch on the screen while using the pen on it would be nice, and being able to set the pen buttons. If I can do it, I haven’t found out how.
The speed on the Nvidia 4070 is good. It was an upgrade from a 540M which was really struggling to perform basic Blender tasks toward the end.
1 Like
Curious about your experience with the pen and which one you got. Do you also use it on the touchpad, or only the screen?
I use this one, it came bundled with my laptop.
It works well on the screen, but I found the ‘harder pencil’ tips too slippery and I’m using the softest one for the highest friction, the ‘B’ tip.
The registration on the trackpad seems inaccurate. I use Photoshop a lot, and on the trackpad my writing becomes distorted too long vertically.
Also, the touchpad will register keypresses if you use the pen on it, so you have to turn it off, the pen will still work on it.
On the screen no issue, it works intuitively and as expected, but the touch function of the screen frequently causes issues with touching things it’s not supposed to and I don’t know how to disable this temporarily, so I will get a drawing glove so my right hand can’t affect the touch, but my left can because it is useful for panning and scaling the canvas.
I don’t like how slow the dial is for changing brush sizes etc, I previously used a Wacom Intuos Pro Medium (about an 11-year-old model, still functioning perfectly), and it had a touch dial with a button in the center that worked flawlessly. The movement to adjust sizes was continuous and if I slowed it was responsive and changed sizes carefully too.
The other issue is the screen wobbling while I draw or write. I’ve taken to holding the screen with my left hand to steady it, which is annoying.
I use a laptop stand so there’s no easy fix for this, but I own 3D printers and I think I might design a custom addition to the stand to support the screen from the rear so I can draw without any wobble.
I haven’t tried using the laptop in the ‘180 degree flat open’ position, because I’m worried about breaking the hinge, but I should try before going to the trouble of designing and printing a support.
So all in all I think a 4/5 star review. If I can fix the issues by customising the dial or using the trackpad as a virtual dial, get the glove and it insulates my touch, and steady the screen automatically, then it will be 5/5 and I see no need to shell out big bucks for a new, large Wacom Cintiq.
I used to have an old model Cintiq 12" with me, it was such a hassle to set up with something like 5 or 6 cables, and I had issues with parallax error that I didn’t use it much (the pen tip does not correspond to where the mark is placed on the canvas depending on your viewing angle, it could be calibrated but it was more of a compromise than a perfect solution, this screen does not appear to have this issue at all funnily enough, maybe the tech has improved in around the 10 years since I bought the old 12WX Cintiq).
It also didn’t have a colour-accurate display, which is something I do love about this laptop after struggling with an aging and very inaccurate IPS display on my last laptop.
I did get a warning from the ProArt Hub that Pantone will not support this laptop after 2023, which was listed as a selling point. I know they pulled the same crap with Photoshop so I hope their company fails and burns to the ground for their hostile business practices.
180-degree screen angle: yeah, this selling point is a joke. I can’t imagine anyone would want to try and turn it 180 degrees flat open. First off, it’s simply impossible and secondly, it will, as you mentioned, break the hinge if you try.
ASUS Dial: Required to rotate jog wheel 2 (!) steps, to move 1 frame, makes the dial unusable. Same thing in Davinci Resolve and any program where you want to scrub a timeline… On top of that, it does not react to speed (timeline is scrubbed in constant speed and way too slow). I just don’t get why they don’t test their software before marketing it as something that’s intended to be used professionally.
It is, however, possible to give control of the dial to Microsoft Wheel (just hit Win key and search for “wheel”; you have to set this up in ASUS Dial & Control panel software first). However I did not manage getting it to work with Blender. Curious to know if it’s possible somehow?
Keyboard Light: Randomly turns off for no reason. In the middle of the dark night, you often have to try and guess which key was the keyboard light (F7) while holding Fn key. Super annoying.
For me, I’ll give it a generous 2/5 given that I also get the charging message saying “Plugged In” that covers the center of my screen once eg. posing a character in Blender, etc. If the latter wouldn’t be a case for me, I’d give it a 2.5, well, 3/5 thanks to the sturdy and well-built chassi.
Aha, I didn’t rate the laptop as a whole, but only the pen drawing abilities.
Even so I might still rate it a 4/5 as it’s an upgrade from a laptop 11 years old that was hindering me in tasks I needed to perform.
Thank you about the tip for windows wheel, I’ll try setting it up soon and report if it works here.
I don’t know about the keyboard backlight, mine does that too. It’s probably a ‘eco’ setting buried in a menu somewhere that changes it without my consent and needs to be turned off.
The 180 degree thing maybe it means the laptop has a more durable hinge when used normally for normal tasks. One can wonder.
On a possible note, I might have managed to remedy the constant “Plugged in” reminder while, in fact, being plugged in. I ‘updated’ the motherboard BIOS, which was already up to date (v303) but I just reinstalled it once again and the nuiscance hasn’t appeared even under hard stress so far … knock on wood (scratch that, back to ‘normal’ again, will have to return it)
Right, please post any tricks you might find for this particular model. I’ll do the same.
This page was useful for info on customising the wheel/dial settings from Microsoft to control the Asus dial instead of the ProArt Studio program. That’s how I’m using it now to avoid the annoying problem with multiple clicks and turns to get the setting I want.
The next step in the process is to set the very first icon to Custom Tool. The Custom Tool option lets you associate keyboard shortcuts with the dial. Over the years, I have found that most applications support the use of keyboard shortcuts, even if they don’t prominently advertise those shortcuts. In the case of Pinnacle Studio, I found these shortcuts to be useful:
- Right Arrow: Move forward one frame
- Left Arrow: Move back one frame
- N: Split the clip at the current position
I got it working how I like on Photoshop. I set Photoshop as a custom app, it works as expected.
You hold down the dial and select which function you want. By default, it’s set to the 1st one, which is always the custom app function.
For me left is [, right is ], and click is X so my brush size gets smaller, larger, and X to swap colours.
For Blender, I can’t make it function well. The Asus app and Windows Settings don’t recognise Blender as a program when I put it in.
Blender sliders apparently can’t be controlled by anything other than a mouse.
Trying to zoom in and out while activating the brush sizes doesn’t work, now when a number slider is selected.
The default scroll function works to zoom the viewport.
Something it can’t do is middle click, which if it could do that I could navigate the scene including pan with my left hand and the touchpad, while using the pen with the right.
You can zoom (very slowly) by gesturing with pinches with the trackpad. Rotate works well.
I set the pen pressure to control the strength of the pen and size, it’s working a lot better and I started sculpting as a test, but got carried away and started copying Michelangelo’s David.
1 Like
One last thing, Max. I know I digress from the main topic, for which I’m sorry, but I’m curious about your experience of the display resolution of this laptop. For some reason, I’m ending up with too small / unintelligible UI elements in many apps including Blender. Is that something you also experienced?
My Windows settings are 3200x2000 (recommended) and systemwide Scale to 175%. In Blender I’m using Preferences > Interface > Display > Resolution Scale 1.0.
I’m also using a Wacom Intuos pen tablet (you too?) and the on-scren UI of that software is totally unreadable. Again, this becomes a problem in lots of apps using this laptop.