Tablet Polling Frequency -- Is this a bug? (with .blends) (SOLVED)

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

Playing with the Mudbox demo, I think I might have figured out something about the problem I’ve been having with Sculpt Mode.

http://i442.photobucket.com/albums/qq150/bunnnnnnnny/th_sculpt_texture2.png
blend @ pasteall

I think it has something to do with interpretation of the data being passed from the tablet. When I quickly scratch a line across a mesh in Sculpt Mode, the line appears jittery and spaced even with Spacing set to zero. Only if I move the brush slowly (maybe ‘reasonably slowly’) do I get a smooth, accurate line. Maybe the jittering with speed and the jittering with textures are the same issue?

This jittering with speed doesn’t happen in the Mudbox demo, or any of the 2D software I use.

My specs are: Windows XP x64 SP2, 4GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 7600GT, Wacom Intuos3 6x11. All drivers are updated current. (The jittering with speed used to occur with my old Graphire2 tablet in XP 32 SP3, too!)

http://i442.photobucket.com/albums/qq150/bunnnnnnnny/th_sculpt_problem_25.png
blend @ pasteall

As this happens with the default Draw brush in 2.5 too, I’m wondering if I should submit this as an outright bug, or if it’s just some kind of memory issue (with 4GB?), or a setting I’ve overlooked.

2

In your 2.5 screenshot you have smoothing off so there isn’t going to be any interpretation (on Blenders side).

With spacing at 10 drawing a line as fast as I can gives smooth results (using a Intuos4).

If hardware was the issue (unlikely) the CPU would be the most likely culprit.

3

Ah – this solves the spacing issue in 2.5! Thanks, N30N!

http://i442.photobucket.com/albums/qq150/bunnnnnnnny/th_sculpt_fix_25.png

(Changing the spacing in 2.49 doesn’t fix it, though – not that it matters.)

Boy, I can’t wait to sculpt in 2.5. The new ‘Smooth Stroke’ tool is great, and fixes that minimum distance problem!

4

Smooth stroke has been around for quite a while, it can be enabled with shift+s in 24.x.

5

‘Smooth Stroke’ in the build of 2.5 I’m using (Zoo-Blender’s build from Sept. 25) is different than the old Smooth Stroke in 2.49b: it updates on mouseup regardless of the length of the stroke, and the cursor is modeled after the one in Mudbox 2. I hadn’t even known it’d been updated!