Right I vote to keep in the vector tools. Why?
Pencil has some of the best cartoonist centric illustration tools.
It allows you to use the pencil tool too slice up cell tone areas and fill in gaps. It sounds like a small thing, but it greatly simplifies the process of cell shading coloring. This is where inkscape fails- it cannot slice up fills like that.
The bucket tool makes perfect fills with no annoying things to clean up at sharp corner areas- this is where inkscape fails miserably.The bucket tool there suffers from the same problems a bitmap based bucket tool would.
Also the fills are glued to the outlines, which means that changing the shape of a line affects the fill as well. This is where inkscape fails miserably again.
Pencil2d can automatically glue strokes you make to ones that are close to them. This is extremely handy when you have to bucket fill stuff afterwards. However pencil does not give the artist control over the glue threshold. Sometimes the stroke gluing is unwanted, forcing the artist to zoom in more to reduce the threshold.
Inkscape does not have a way to autosnap stroke’s start/end , creating a lot of mindless clean up work for the artist. So pencil2d wins here too.
Pencil2d currently hast vastly superior workflow approach for cartoonists to inkscape. But the tools need some polishing. And some of this polishing is really low hanging fruit work;
Here are the low hanging goals:
- The pencil tool defaults - vector curve smoothing value is by default too high, giving strokes a rather unpredictable result. At first I didnt know that this value is in preferences, so I kept it default and raged on how much its smoothing my strokes. So reduce that value to about 25-30%. Its too high by defaylt.
- the hidden stroke smoothing value - it’s currently hidden in the preferences window. In my opinion you should bring it to the left side panel- to be always visible and quick to change.
Higher hanging fruits:
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Its difficult to clean up overshoots with the smudge tool. We need some sort of a way to slice a stroke and delete where it overshoots. At least delete stroke nodes.
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There should be a way to control how much a stroke’s start/end autosnaps to previous strokes you made (GLUE) . This is very useful atm- its like a killer feature- but it needs more control!
If a developer is willing to put in the work, I am willing to fund this or create a funding campaign similar to the one that synfig is having.
Dont kill pencil2d’s vector tools. They are the only open source alternative to toonboom’s inking/coloring tools. Inkscape really really sucks at this atm.