How to Smoothing lines in 1.2.0?

Continuing the discussion from This Art Showcase Contains Cute:

I am curious of how you made lines so smooth in MyPaint? My lines are always shaked in MyPaint, :). what brushes are you using to paint these works?
@ilovepumpkin

This would make a good FAQ question. I’m not speaking for @Jdan-S here, I’ll leave their answer to the Showcase Thread of D… aaaawwww~! :heart_eyes: For artists wanting to make smooth Anime/MLP outlines, there’s a few features for making smooth lines in MyPaint 1.2.0 and beyond:

The old way is to increase the Slow Tracking setting for the brush you’re using. It’s most accessible from the Tool Options dock panel (cog icon on the UI Toolbar) when you are painting in freehand mode. You’ll see a slider labelled “Smooth:” when the panel is docked :slightly_smiling:

The new way is to use the Inking Tool that was introduced in 1.2.0. This is basically a system for making freehand smoother for flowy inky lines. It respects the Slow Tracking setting, but it’s more controllable: you lay down a bunch of control points, and you can tweak them after drawing. The disadvantage to the inking tool is that when you click on the :heavy_check_mark: button to say the stroke is done, you can’t finesse it any further.

You can use the Lines and Curves tool as well, but it’s much more limited, and probably not what you want. It’s a bit harder to use, and it doesn’t respect the Slow Tracking setting - it’s more about exact shapes than smoothing out lines.

I am surprised that I got two replies to my basic question.They are really good tips!! Thank you! :slight_smile:

If you still need additional control for smoother lines, consider trialing the 3rd party product Lazy Nezumi Pro, it works with most paint programs and I’m using it with MyPaint without issues. You can use it for free for 30 day, after that you need to buy a licence but it’s very cheap. It also has other features for drawing perspective and a lot of other things, all shown on the website.
Having said all that I find MyPaint has great inbuilt smoothing controls anyway, but Lazy Nezumi Pro takes it up a notch.

Sounds interesting. I will give it a try. Thanks for your reply!! :).

Ah~, I found Lazy Nezumi Pro only supports Windows but I am a Linux user. Do you have any additional Linux solutions to recommend?

One thing I did was use a command line tool called xsetwacom. It has a couple parameters to help against noise: RawSample and Suppress. RawSample allows you to adjust the number of samples taken from the tablet before the coordinates are committed to the mouse pointer on screen. Suppress prevents the mouse pointer from moving unless it has been moved by a given amount. So in other words it can help smooth out your lines by removing the unwanted jittery your hand may produce. Here’s what it would looks like on my script I have

xsetwacom --set "Wacom Intuos PT M Pen stylus" RawSample 9
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Intuos PT M Pen stylus" Suppress 10

Here’s more information about xwacomset here

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This looks cool! From its name, looks like it only supports Wacom tablet, right? What I have is a genius tablet, not sure if it works or not. Anyway, I could give it a try - thanks a lot for your reply!

Yeah I believe xsetwacom only works for wacom tablets, but you can find out easily by using the xsetwacom --list devices command and see if your tablet is listed.

If not you could ask these guys to see if they can help you configure your tablet:

Also to let you know, the latest git version of MyPaint as new options for our Ink Pen tool which will help you simplify your the amount of points making using it so much easier. It should be available pretty soon on in our PPA for Ubuntu base Distributions. This will at lease address some of the problems when it comes to smoothing lines.