10

I have tried to make an animated pen draw a solid, curving line - with limited results! I tried dynamic paint, but couldn't get a decent line, just a big fuzzy mess! The best I could do was with a particle system, but that is made of dots and, the faster the pen moves the further apart the dots appear - not quite like the kind of line a pen makes. I don't want a pre-determined (animated) line, I just want it to draw wherever I make the pen go. Is this easy, or a bit of a tall order?

  1. Dynamic Paint

    Using Dynamic Paint

  2. Particle System

    Using aParticle System

Community
  • 1
SteveW
  • 2,232
  • 5
  • 18
  • 22

1 Answers1

9

There is more than likely a better way to go about this… but for the time being, it seems this can occur for several reasons, such as how dense your canvas is and the size of the part of the 'brush' touching the canvas etc.

Using the default canvas and brush settings for the most part, you can get around this easily enough by cranking up the number of subdivisions in your canvas mesh and optionally by increasing your Sub-Steps.

enter image description here

iKlsR
  • 43,379
  • 12
  • 156
  • 189
  • I have tried this previously, but found it to be too slow to make it worth while! - Maybe a script could be written to 'join the dots'?? - beyond my ability at this stage. :) – SteveW Jul 11 '13 at 22:13
  • @SteveW as I said, there is likely a better way.. :) I don't use dynamic paint much so I'm not sure. It would also help if you mention what you have tried in the future. – iKlsR Jul 11 '13 at 22:15
  • you're right, more detail would have helped. It's a while since I was working on this, and I just thought it might be worth asking. – SteveW Jul 11 '13 at 22:22
  • 1
    @SteveW the only other suggestion I could give is to use a larger brush and scale/resize the rest of your scene accordingly. – iKlsR Jul 11 '13 at 22:24
  • That's an interesting idea, I'll see if I can make it work. Could be a bit tricky to resize, though, as the pen is part of a machine (harmonograph) that I struggled to make in the first place!! :) – SteveW Jul 11 '13 at 22:34