Wacom Inkling

[John Bigboote]

Hey all- Had some extra coin jingling around and was thinking of getting back into drawing... animating on paper- so I tried the Wacom Inkling. I had grand ideas of using it in conjunction with an animation disc to expedite the process.

 

http://www.wacom.com/en/products/inkling.aspx

 

The Inkling claims to "bridge the gap between traditional, freehand sketching and digital development by capturing a digital likeness of a pen-on-paper sketch." What it actually does, via clumsy hardware and software- is give you a completely unusable vector file. In an illustration for the product, they show the resulting vector shape as minimal in points and elegant, easy to edit with the bezier handles... in reality, it captures SO MANY control points that it is completely uneditable, unless a thin-out or smoothing process is done via Illustrator or Flash. It claims to capture 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity, but all I have seen in my initial tests is 1, plus- pressure sensitivity seems to be a mute point since the vector points captured are strokes, not fills like the website claims. The pen you use is a standard ball-point ink pen, which I like to draw with anyway after sketching with a non-photo blue pencil. But, the clinky, wobbly feel this pen has makes a Bic pen feel like a far superior tool. Registration is a big issue, as you draw the eye-shape of a character and return later to draw the iris... when you see your digital version you will see an offset has happened over time- placing the circular iris outside of the eye-shape! Unacceptable! I seemed to notice some distortion as well...

 

Overall, I don't think this product is ready for release, and I expected more from a company the industry has come to regard so highly.

 

If anyone on the forum is interested, I will sell this for a loss from the $200 Wacom price. Very slightly used.

[Wildsided]

That's a shame John, I think Rodney posted about this a few months back and it got me interested, but if it's as bad as that then I'll stick with my Intuos 3 and just scan my sketches and ink over them digitally like I do now. Thanks for the review.

[pixelplucker]

Wasn't there another product out there that used a special paper that the pen would record the strokes and you could load it in the computer?

 

As far as automatically vectorizing, I think that it might be too lossy and take too much system resources to do a descent job. I use auto tracers, very high end ones for much of my work. To get accurate results it doesn't just happen instantly and vectors though clean and scalable actually can take up much more memory and system use to render on the screen.

 

So far of all the tools out there I settled on a Cintiqe. I have found tablets in most cases won't track exactly as you see on the screen which makes sense since your looking at one spot and drawing on another. The coordination takes a little getting used to. Drawing right on the screen is much more intuitive.

[largento]

I've virtually stopped making any real attempts at drawing anymore. I sold my Cintiq last year. I did get an iPad recently and have been playing around with some of the free paint apps (using a stylus Wacom makes), but it's more just playing around. There is, of course, no pressure sensitivity. I hated to sell my Cintiq, but I had to admit that I almost never used it and I was still able to easily get half what I paid for it.

[Wildsided]

Cintiq's are way outa my price range. My old Laptop that starting crapping out and had to be replaced had a Wacom powered touch screen that worked beautifully for drawing until the unit started over heating every couple of hours. So now I'm back with the tablet.

 

Quick note though, after reading john's review I watched a youtube review by an artist that works for Activision (videogames company) and he'd got some really good results with the inkling so it might be a good idea to fiddle with the settings some more before writing it off.

[John Bigboote]

Hey Wildside... I'll look for that on YT. I don't know if there is much along the lines of settings at all. I had a Cintiq 24" for several years at my last job... they are kinda a gimmick. They eliminate the triangulation between your eye, hand and screen is all. Most people don't even see it as an issue with a regular drawing tablet.

[robcat2075]

For me, the disconnect between where my hand was and where the drawing appeared on the screen was a big problem in using a regular tablet.

 

I got a used 18" Cintiq on ebay for $600 and it's a huge improvement for me. The alignment between the cursor and the ink is never quite perfect, that's a problem they still haven't eliminated yet, but it's still way better and I can do things like this now.

[Wildsided]

. That' the review John, his sketch style is a little scratchy so that may have something to do with it. He agrees with your point regarding the bundled software and he also uses different software for editing called sketchbook pro which can directly import the inklings file format as layers. So again that might have something to do with his results.