TVP12 - Floating Line Smoothing Panel intended to be Global?

[Cardin]

In TVP12.0.0, Right clicking on the Line Smoothing Indicator opens up the floating Line Smoothing Panel from. You can interact with the panel but it doesn't work at all, which is good, but it's confusing to have this remnant of TVP11 here so it should be removed.

Video shows me engaging the "false" panel but obviously the parameters chosen do not affect the stroke.

[Edited ] The floating Line Smoothing panel does not seem to work as I assume it was intended...

TVP12 Line Smoothing Panel Bug.mp4

(8.29 MiB) Downloaded 89 times

If the floating panel is supposed to function as Global Line Smoothing it should be given a distinctive label to make that clear. It also only works if both the floating panel and tool panels on the side are active for most tools like Pen, Brush, Airbrush.

TVP Line Smoothing.jpg (45.78 KiB) Viewed 1380 times

Also, may we please have a "Toggle LOCAL Smoothing" shortcut?. All of the current shortcuts are synced to the floating panel and there are none for the local smoothing options nor for the "Activate Line Smoothing" box in the Tools Panel.



Thanks

[kelanhordos]

Hi Cardin. I think there is some kind of odd interaction or display bug going on, but I don't get this particular behaviour. More testing needed I think?

I think part of what's going on is Local smoothing is supposed to override "Global" Smoothing in the Line smoothing panel, so you can have separate smoothing for different tools. I noticed your local smoothing is set very low (1.5) and you have HUD option (which shows the pulled string) turned off. I see you have a 4k screen, so I wonder what resolution are you working at? Is it possible it is smoothing(the 1.5) setting but very little and not noticeable?

Can you try turning the local smoothing off and see what it does?

In the video below I activate the Line Smoothing in the pop up panel, the Activate Line smoothing on the pen and the Local Smoothing. You can see that there is a bit of a glitch that I circle where the display is bugged and appearing where it shouldnt be, but I still get my line smoothing activated. I switch to the filled stroke tool at the end to show that it also works on that tool.

Line Smoothing.mp4

(5.24 MiB) Downloaded 78 times

[Cardin]

Hi Cardin. I think there is some kind of odd interaction or display bug going on, but I don't get this particular behaviour. More testing needed I think?

I think part of what's going on is Local smoothing is supposed to override "Global" Smoothing in the Line smoothing panel, so you can have separate smoothing for different tools. I noticed your local smoothing is set very low (1.5) and you have HUD option (which shows the pulled string) turned off. I see you have a 4k screen, so I wonder what resolution are you working at? Is it possible it is smoothing(the 1.5) setting but very little and not noticeable?

Can you try turning the local smoothing off and see what it does?

In the video below I activate the Line Smoothing in the pop up panel, the Activate Line smoothing on the pen and the Local Smoothing. You can see that there is a bit of a glitch that I circle where the display is bugged and appearing where it shouldnt be, but I still get my line smoothing activated. I switch to the filled stroke tool at the end to show that it also works on that tool.

Selection Tool Line Smoothing.mp4

(17.66 MiB) Downloaded 73 times

Thanks, kelanhordos. You are correct that the parameters of the floating panel do indeed work but only IF Activate Line Smoothing is also checked on the tool panel with local smoothing turned off. But there is still a problem with the implementation.

My assumption is that the way it currently works is not actually how it was intended. Or perhaps, at the very least, there should be some changes made to make it clearer.

The video below shows that this "extra" panel has Line Smoothing Active but the other Line Smoothing option integrated into the tool panel is NOT checked. The initial strokes are NOT affected by the settings in the additional panel. It's only when I also click the primary line smoothing box from the Pencil Brush Panel that the smoothing is actually activated. Your video affirms this as well. But why should we need to click on BOTH boxes? You are correct that it does indeed function, but if the floating panel is indeed supposed to be GLOBAL, I shouldn't need to click on both boxes for "Activate Line Smoothing" for each tool in order for it to work. That completely defeats the purpose of having a Global option.

Line Smoothing Floating Panel.mp4

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Secondly, consider the FREEHAND Selection Tool. In TVP11, the Selection Tool was affected by Line Smoothing because in that version, there was no Local Smoothing Option. If Line Smoothing was ON, it was ON for every tool. My assumption is that for TVP12, the devs added Local Smoothing for all the tools that were intended to have smoothing. As we see, there is no local smoothing option for the FREEHAND Selection Tool integrated into the panel like the other tools (Pencil, Brush, etc) so I don't think it was intended to be affected by Line Smoothing in TVP12. But it is indeed affected by Line Smoothing parameters from the floating panel as demonstrated in the video below...

Selection Tool Line Smoothing.mp4

(17.66 MiB) Downloaded 73 times

Also, the fact that ALL the shortcuts for Line Smoothing only affect the Floating Panel and not the parameters attached to the Tool Panel suggest there was an oversight in how the new functionality was implemented.

[kelanhordos]

Thanks for more testing Cardin! Very interesting stuff.

For what it's worth, my impression was the Active Line Smoothing in the pop up panel would be a kind of global scaling for all tools that can use line smoothing, including the filled stroke, selections tool etc since these work with only the "Global" Active Line Smoothing toggled on in the pop up window.
The Active Line Smoothing in the brush section would be if you want to keep Line smoothing on for the other tools but off for brush or vice versa. For example I can have the Brush Active Line smoothing active and it will smooth my brush, but not smooth my selection tool if the "Global" Line smoothing is off in the pop up panel. As a side note this is how I personally used line-smoothing, as previously I would have a script that would activate line smoothing when I used stroke filled, and turned it off when I switched to Brush.
The Local smoothing would then be an option to override the "Global" settings so you could have a different setting for each brush that has a local setting you can activate.

That seems to be how it is working for me, and given the way I was using scripts before to accomplish a similar feat it feels like it's working, but I can understand it seeming redundant in your example.

Just a note, there also seems to be a bug where the "global" setting is pushing the local setting to a higher level when the "global" is set really high, but I haven't figured it out perfectly yet.

[Cardin]

Just a note, there also seems to be a bug where the "global" setting is pushing the local setting to a higher level when the "global" is set really high, but I haven't figured it out perfectly yet.

Hmmm that is strange.

For what it's worth, my impression was the Active Line Smoothing in the pop up panel would be a kind of global scaling for all tools that can use line smoothing, including the filled stroke, selections tool etc since these work with only the "Global" Active Line Smoothing toggled on in the pop up window.

Good point! Thanks for your perspective, kelanhordos! How you described your workflow makes a lot of sense. I edited some of my post to be less presumptuous about the intended functionality. In the absence of a TVP12 Manual, I can only speculate about some of the new features...

...But the quoted statement above begs the question, "Why have only some tools given the option for Local Smoothing and others only a shared Global Line Smoothing option?" As stated ,Filled Stroke and the Freehand Selection only have a Global Line Smoothing option. Why? If you wanted Line Smoothing with Filled Stroke but NOT with Freehand Selection, you'd have to toggle Global Line Smoothing ON and OFF each time you swapped these tools. I would think the purpose of adding local smoothing would be to avoid such situations for every tool.

Honestly, I just don't see the need for line smoothing options when using Freehand Selection anyway. Part of the reason why Local Smoothing was even implemented was thanks to a discussion about TVP11's line smoothing for the Eraser Tool discussed in this thread https://www.tvpaint.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13220.

This also reminds me that I requested line smoothing to be disabled with the Freehand Selection Tool in Feature and Improvement Requests section a couple years ago viewtopic.php?p=130089#p130089

In that post I referenced a salient point that forum user and industry veteran, D.T. Nethery, brought up in related thread about this as well. Most software, like Photoshop, automatically deactivates line smoothing when the Freehand Selection tool is active. It just makes sense.

Do you need Line Smoothing enabled when using the Selection Tool ? If not, I wonder if the developers could add a function where Line Smoothing is automatically disabled when switching from a Drawing Tool to a Selection Tool ? Photoshop has this functionality. When Line Smoothing is enabled in Photoshop it only applies to using a brush or pencil tool , but the Line Smoothing is automatically turned off when you switch to using an Eraser or a Selection Tool, then smoothing is back on when you switch back to using a brush or pencil tool again. I'm reminded that a couple of years ago I had added a request in the Feature and Improvement Requests sub-forum to have Line Smoothing automatically disabled when switching from a Drawing tool to an Eraser. I still think that would be a desirable behavior. I wonder about the same when switching from a Drawing tool to Selection tool ? Would it make sense to have the Line Smoothing automatically disabled ? (or do you need Smoothing on when using the Selection tool ?)

[kelanhordos]

...But the quoted statement above begs the question, "Why have only some tools given the option for Local Smoothing and others only a shared Global Line Smoothing option?" As stated ,Filled Stroke and the Freehand Selection only have a Global Line Smoothing option. Why? If you wanted Line Smoothing with Filled Stroke but NOT with Freehand Selection, you'd have to toggle Global Line Smoothing ON and OFF each time you swapped these tools. I would think the purpose of adding local smoothing would be to avoid such situations for every tool.

That is a good question! I am also just trying to understand the way it seems to work without any documentation to back it up, so these are all just guesses after trying to figure out the new functions. I would support that there ought to be local smoothing for each individual tool if it is easy enough to implement. As far as I can tell the three tools that don't have local smoothing are freehand select, freehand cut, and filled stroke, perhaps they are connected under the hood somehow since they use a lasso like tool for their functionality?

Regarding the bugs I mentioned above, I have seen it happen a couple more times where the local smoothing seems to "jump" to a higher value when the Line Smoothing Pop up is set high, but I havent been able to recreate it.

The little graphical glitch seems to be related to having local smoothing enabled with pulled string and Real Time and HUD both active, and with the Activate line smoothing in the brush section enabled. Then unclicking the Activate line smoothing box while the local smoothing is still enabled. When you draw there will be a the little circle stuck at the beginning of your stroke. I haven't gotten it to glitch as badly as in that video yesterday but this seems consistent.