Setting Up a Tablet with CC3+
ScottA
Surveyor
I just purchased a tablet to use with CC3+ as I thought it would give me a finer touch to draw. Let me say that I have never had a tablet, I've never used a tablet, and I know NOTHING about tablets. So I'm trying to configure it for CC3+ and am getting nowhere. Nothing seems to happen. The driver is installed, and the tablet does work (have fiddled with it in a graphics program just to see). I have printed out the sheet as per the CC3 instructions and secured it to the tablet. I hit the Configure button in the Tablet menu and get the Tablet Screen Lower Left Point message in the bottom bar. So... what next? I've tried touching the pen to the various points on the sheet as indicated by the instructions, and nothing happens. The same command remains in the bar and if I hit Enter or do anything else I get an error message saying Tablet Not Configured. I will freely admit that here, with tablets, I'm a complete dummy, so any help I can get would be appreciated!!!
Comments
Is the tablet you bought supported by CC3+? Does it work in, say, Paint?
A modern stylus-based tablet is very much a click-drag-release device. To draw a stroke with the stylus in most programs, you push down on the stylus to start the action, move to your desired endpoint, and then lift the stylus. CC3 doesn't really work well this way because in CC3, you need to click down with the stylus, then lift it up slightly and hover it over to the destination, where you click down again. There isn't that sense of pen on paper because that's not the model that CC3 uses. To get an idea of the worst offender, try the freehand command, which does something akin to drawing a stroke, but with a click-release at each end. It was designed to work with a mouse and doesn't really work well at all with a stylus.
I have had a few tablets over the years, with the most recent being a Wacom Intuos tablet. Using these tablets with CC3 has always been a frustrating experience for me because I kept wanting it to be a stroke-based device in CC3 like it was in other programs that I was using. I eventually found that it was much less aggravating for me if I used the tablet as I did my mouse. At that point, I just gave up on using the tablet for CC3 and went back to using my mouse.
Having used CAD programs, PS, Illustrator, Painter, etc., using a tablet with a vector program is less than ideal in almost all cases.
If you do plan on using the tablet, from my experience, it is going to take a lot of time to get used to using it and how it reacts to CC3+. With practice, you can do some fun things with it, but in most cases it is easier to use a mouse. But I still find myself wanting to use my tablet instead.
I am currently producing PNG graphics - but would really prefer to more scalable.
Tim
For example, Illustrator has widely different capabilities than CC3+, so it is pretty much a guarantee that if you manage to do something there that you cannot do in CC3+ itself, it won't work in CC3+ anyway. This holds true for all programs using a vector format. You may be able to use a common file format for interchange, but again, as opposed to raster images, a common file format doesn't mean it will look identical in both applications. If you want to create artwork in external software, I strongly suggest using a raster format instead.
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Instead I use it a LOT when drawing things in GIMP or Photopaint to import as new symbols to use in CC3
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