Line Work / Smooth Strokes

[saria]

Quick question for everyone today - I did a search and couldn't find anything like this asked. I have really been getting into the details now that I have my tablet, however anytime I draw lines are always pixelated or choppy, and the brush bleeds randomly. I don't have jitter on, and I've tried turning dynamics off and it still somewhat does it. I also can't work out how to get nice pretty tapered lines with my tablet.

For those of you who do hand drawn bits and pieces such as mountains, or rocks, or hand drawn map assets - would you be kind enough to share what dynamics/settings you are using for the line work so I have even a chance of getting smooth lines?

Am I just drawing too small? Should I draw bigger then re-size? I've tried this and it tends to look very blurry. I usually use it at 1-3px for line art, and I'm making map assets at around 200-300px. I also tried doing mountains for cartography. Even though you'd think when I zoom out it would look good, you can still see the difference between my art and some of the other folks who I hope to be like when I grow up

A good example is here: here - take a look at the rounded carpet, instead of looking smooth you can see the pixels. Or my lines on the tower wall for the 2nd level on the left - also very pixelated. Yet I see a lot of cartographers who don't suffer that.

Any advice would be super appreciated, thanks guys

tldr: How do you make smooth line art in Gimp or Photoshop?

[Deadshade]

tldr: How do you make smooth line art in Gimp or Photoshop?

As I have no tablet I can answer only this one. When I really want to have very good lines in contrast, width, smoothness and shape I do them with pencils on paper and then scan the result into Gimp.
Nobody had invented a more reliable and accurate device for line work than hand and pencil yet.

[J.Edward]

I use a 5px brush almost all the time. Seldom go below 4px.
I can't speak for GIMP but in PS I have smoothing on and use shape dynamics, unless I want a hard single thickness line.
For a circle carpet I wouldn't use the layer stroke. I would make a round selection, fill on one layer and stroke on another via edit-stroke at no less than 2 px.
That said, I work at large resolutions so a 5px brush is usually pretty small.

Even with smoothing or some type of antialiasing, a 1 px brush will always be jaggy, as often will a 2px brush.

[- Max -]

in PS I have smoothing on and use shape dynamics, unless I want a hard single thickness line..

Same here. Depending on the scale and the size of the map, I usually work with 3-6px brush. Go lower than 3px and you'll enter the pixels party

[Vhey]

and I'm making map assets at around 200-300px.

If it matters. I make assets at 400-1000px using larger brushes and large strokes. Then size down for the map. If your lines are crisp at high resolution, they will general appear crisp when sized down. Mostly.

[saria]

Great answers - thanks guys!

So then, if I were to work at a higher resolution - say the 6px or more, should then my maps just be higher res? I have been creating at 2000px x 2000px as an example, so I would just make them larger to avoid the pixel look and this way I wouldn't need to scale the assets as much. Did I get that right?

[Larb]

I do all my linework in Paint Tool SAI because I think the default pen tool does lines far better than Photoshop.

[xpian]

When working in Photoshop, I always felt that my fine lines were too "fuzzy." Reading the posts above makes me think this is a common problem, and my issue was trying to use too small a brush. Working at 3 px or less in size, PS's natural anti-aliasing in the paintbrush tool, even when using a "hard" brush, is more than I like for my taste.

Experimenting in Manga Studio, I've found a lot to like. There's an anti-alias sort of setting on each tool, allowing you to set how fuzzy the edges of your lines should be. It has four or five stops on it, which is better control than you can get in PS. However, wouldn't you know it, the difference between the final stop--which is NO anti-aliasing, just hard, sharp pixels--and the next-to-last anti-aliased stop, is still a bigger gap than I would like. At least, when drawing with very small brushes.

I'm realizing, of course, that my solution for Manga Studio and PS should just be to change my scale, and work with larger brushes like everyone else. I'll bet the problems mostly go away at that point. For some reason, I'm always getting sucked down to the pixel-by-pixel level of drawing, when I need to train myself to work at a slightly more zoomed-out level.

What I actually do, instead, is work in ProCreate on the iPad. It indulges me and lets me instantly zoom to the pixel scale (what we used to call FAT BITS in the days of Mac Paint). It also has a default level of anti-aliasing on the ink strokes that feels perfect for me. I've had to tweak one of the default inking pens just a bit to get it where I like it, but it works really well. You can see the kind of line it produces in the tutorials thread that I've been adding to lately. http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...ad.php?t=32668

[Chick]

If you are using Photoshop, use 3px or bigger brush, resolution at least 300 dpi, and image size at least 2000x2000. Make sure your brush smoothing is set on. If this is still giving you jiggly lines, try making the brush spacing tighter.

[Jacktannery]

Great answers - thanks guys!

So then, if I were to work at a higher resolution - say the 6px or more, should then my maps just be higher res? I have been creating at 2000px x 2000px as an example, so I would just make them larger to avoid the pixel look and this way I wouldn't need to scale the assets as much. Did I get that right?

Exactly. This in the only way to avoid pixelation ultimately. You say you aim your maps to be 2000 by 2000. I use GIMP to make my maps, and I find that my old computer (a decaded ago) could easily handle 2000x2000 pixel maps. My new computer (3 years old now) easily handles 4000x4000 maps. So now all my maps are 4000x4000. The difference is huge.

If I were to create your map you posted in post 1, it would be a 4000 x 4000. More importantly, I would have created the two elements as separate 2000 by 2000 files, then exported them as jpgs and combined them into a third 4000 x 4000 document.

The trick is to plan everything in advance so your computer can handle the size of each document and each document is high-res enough for you to get a high level of detail. As a comparison, I went back and measured some of my ones; the townhouse near the bottom of this post measures 1600 by 1000 pixels http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...367#post229624.