I’ve made really great use of existing pen pressure support so far! Could there be additional support for pen tilt? Pen tilt support would make it much easier to paint full-screen pixel illustrations or other difficult subjects like a cloudy sky if I can control both size and gradient. I’m aware that what I’m doing is well outside of pixel art’s strengths as a pixel pusher of ten years but I’m willing to explore its boundaries.
Or, is functionality currently possible with the right extensions?
Hi Gensun!
Not speaking for the developer or associated with the development in any way, I can still shead some light for this feature as a developer altogether.
First I thought of that the brush shape would change according to the pen tilt. It seems that this would be hard to implement for any drawing program as they don’t usually support real time changes for the brushes. Photoshop is an oddball because it creates an actual 3D environment and a model of the brush and then uses physics to apply them on the canvas (if I’m correct).
I believe that this feature would need huge rework for the core program making it also unstable for the process. However if you would only squish the brush when tilting the pen there could be a specific drawing tool for this feature only, but to implement it for the other brushes would be impossible as you would need to code how the brush acts on all the different sizes on all the different brushes.
However if you would only change the size (Size number of the brush) and opacity (also number) or color (once again a number value) according to a tilt it might be possible. As you suggested.
But then there is the IO side of the things. Most of us have been using wacoms for ages and their drivers… are up to date but creating the connection between tilting interface and the program through the drivers might be tricky. The drivers are old from their core and not too good either… It could even be that you would need a permission from Wacom and access to their API to access the feature and that’s only one manufacturer…
Every single manufacturer may have a different solution for the tilting data to be passed on the computer as I’m not aware of windows natively supporting this feature (compared to simple drawing which only moves the mouse and uses the mouse cursor of the windows).
This would mean that it would be hard to cover big set of different hardware and also if the driver is updated this would mean more work for the developer. So the feature would be burden from the moment of it’s creation and would need continuous checking and updating.
Not sure about the extensions though. If the data is easy to capture from the driver it could be possible that someone has implemented this functionality. I’m not familiar with the extensions yet. Only got to know about them today.
But this is only as I see things. The developer might have more insight as they have probably thought this once before.