Cursor for interactive painting?

Does SA 5.x have the ability to display a brush cursor, primarily for the purpose of gauging the size of the brush while painting interactively? This is useful in judging how close the brush is to an edge in the image. There is obviously no need for a displayed brush cursor during auto painting.

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  • No, just the normal arrow cursor. I do understand the appeal of what you are asking for.

    • SA version 6.0?

      • I'll look into it for you. You aren't the first person to ask for something like this.

        I should point out that even if we add it, it might not be as accurate as you would like. The issue is that many studio artist 'brushes' are really virtual entities like clouds of particle or crazy parameter interactions that lead to what a user perceives as a brush of a certain size, but are really the outcome of some generative process.

        So just displaying the size specified in Brush Source control panel may or may not be useful.

        When SA 1 first came out, it was much more straightforward. The Brush Source and how it was size modulated in Brush Modulation was very straightforward to specify and potentially display. But as the paint synthesizer developed over time, things got a lot more complicated. Other paint programs are pretty simple in terms of what they are doing, dragging an image brush around the canvas, end of story.

        The other issue in my mind is that there are a million brush size modulation options. Are you envisioning that this brush cursor would dynamically modulate it's display size to reflect all of the brush size modulation going on in real time as the cursor moves?

        • Something basic would do it for me. The cursor would only need to be active during interactive painting, and then only a rough approximation for the size would be plenty accurate for my needs. I don't see the need for a cursor during auto painting, except during the time when the brush is selected but not yet active. Plus, displaying a dynamic cursor when the user is not interacting on a stroke by stroke basis is probably a waste of CPU time.

          I think a first cut at the feature would be to keep it very simple. If it proves popular, then maybe make it more complicated in V6.x.

          Thanks for the reply

          • I wasn't talking about displaying it during auto-painting. 

            What i was referring to is that when painting manually, the brush size could still be set to modulate automatically as you move the cursor. Some of those options are computed right before the nib is drawn. So if you were using local color difference for modulation for example, you might see one size displayed but then if you move the cursor the size could change and we would not know that new size to display until the next paint nib was actually drawn.

            If we were displaying the modulated size. If we just displayed the max size, then it wouldn't change, but depending on what you were modulating with it could change from that depending on the conditions being used to do the modulation.

            • I think that just starting a simple as possible would be the best way to introduce the feature. Probably the max size and possibly an inner circle of the initial size for the first feature iteration. Refinements could wait to see how people react to having the cursor. Then we could experiment with the various size modulating parameters to see which ones are candidates for changing the cursor boundaries.

              Also, a switch to turn the cursor on and off for those who don't want to see it at all.

              • You can hide the cursor if you are in full screen display mode. It's the Full Screen Cursor preference option (main preferences dialog, general tab). You can use the cmnd 0 hot key command to switch back and forth between regular view and full screen view.

                • For the new feature, a switch to hide the cursor in any display mode ;)

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