Hey, so I tried the latest stable build and pen pressure didn’t work. So I tried the nightly build and everything seems to work great so far, except when I try to do anything with vector layers, if I use the erase tool it clears off everything in that frame entirely. Also the paintbucket tool doesn’t seem to work on vector layers for me either.
My OS is Windows XP sp 3 32-bit
For more detail, the paint bucket works fine if I use the pencil tool in vector layers and the pencil tool lines dont get cleared instantly with the eraser like the pen tool does. So it’s mainly a problem of the pen tool not working correctly in the vector layers.
I couldn’t recreate the problem with erasing pen lines, in either a Linux version built from git source or the Windows nightly. However, i think the eraser is a little wacky on vector layers…sometimes it erases and sometimes it doesn’t. Also couldn’t recreate the fill problem, although it often won’t fill unless you have a perfectly closed shape (maybe Pencil2D should have a point snap feature to close shapes).
On vector layers, the pencil works as a temporary border line, for doing things such as creating multiple colors and gradients within a single shape, and doesn’t make vector art lines itself (the dotted lines won’t be visible in the export). For example, draw a circle with the pen, then draw a line through it with pencil. Then you can fill one side of the pencil with one color, and the other side with another color. The feather of the pencil line determines the softness of the gradient between the two colors (you have to select the pencil line after it’s created in order to adjust the gradient).
The pencil tool also helps to fill shapes that aren’t closed…you can draw with the pencil over a gap in a pen line, and the fill tool will assume it’s a closed shape. That helps to deal with that picky fill problem i mentioned above.
I’m not sure what the purpose of the brush is on vector layers.
You might have already been aware of all this…you were talking about erasing pencil lines, though, and i never really thought about any reason to use the eraser on them in a vector layer unless you were thinking it might be part of the art…i typically just select and cut pencil lines.
I figured that the purpose of the brush on vectors layers was so that you could have an area with clean visible strokes. I also understand that the vector pencil tool isn’t for aesthetics.
Personally I was thinking it would work like my workflow in Flash, where i would use hte brush took to make clean vector versions of my lines, and then I could use the pencil to fill in open areas before filling, then I could erase the pencil strokes and then make new pencil strokes to set up boundaries in the filled space for shaded areas and whatnot.
Either way, unless I went with no vector strokes at all, the ability to use vector brush strokes and fill them is quite important. This problem could very well be a Window XP only problem, so unless there was a new build in the last 2 nights to fix the problem it still holds me back from being able to use Pencil2D for full animations.
EDIT: Okay, now I feel really stupid, I got the brush and the ink pens mixed up. It all works fine. So I guess we can ignore/close this thread. Sorry for the confusion. However, you mentioned the feather of the pencil line, but the Feather slider is greyed out on the pencil tool for me. Having an option that makes the eraser only remove certain types of elements could be nice though, such as only removing pencil lines in vector mode.
In order to use the feather you need to draw your line and then select it. I’m guessing this is so you can see the effect while you adjust the feather, and/or so you don’t have to adjust the feather for ever line you draw. Try filling each side of the pencil line with a different color, then select the line & adjust the feather. Erasing parts of the pencil line isn’t really necessary because they are just guides. But I’d kinda like to see the pencil lines be hidden during playback, like the onion skin is…maybe it will happen eventually.
As far as I can tell the brush in a vector layer has something to do with filling shapes with color, but i can’t figure out exactly how it’s supposed to work. In the recent development version i can’t see it doing anything, but in the Morevna branch you could circle parts of a shape and it would sometimes fill it with color. Not sure what is controlling which parts get filled.
Personally I agree with you about what the brush should do. The pen makes (or should make) a line/curve with a uniform width, and the brush should make a line (technically a shape) with variable width depending on stylus pressure/tilt. Pencil2D is evolving, so i don’t know what it’s going to be a few months from now.