Bush Tool quality

[goonboy]

Does anyone else here see a big difference in line quality (using the Brush Tool) drawing in Flash MX vs. Flash 4? I do quite a bit of animating using a Wacom Tablet and drawing directly in Flash and I get terrible line quality in MX. I usually end up working in Flash 4 because it looks so much better. I've played around with the Smoothing settings in MX to no end but I'm still getting terrible quality. (see attached sample).

http://www.goonland.com/sample.jpg

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks!

[Coffee Cat]

For a long time I used Flash 5 instead of Flash MX for that reason as well - as well as just plain ease of use. Flash 5 is tighter.

Might have something to do with system resources.... Flash 4 and 5 weren't as hefty as MX and MX2004.

I've moved more towards MX and MX2004 lately since I got a Mac, and MX2004 is the only flash fully OSX intigrated.

Flash is going more and more application based, though, and less and less art and animation based - so don't plan on this getting any better. Hang on to your old versions.

[goonboy]

I was afraid of that. Thanks for your input!

[Coffee Cat]

The technique I often use is to smooth the brush fills. If you draw too many "lines" with the brush and select them all and smooth, you're going to get nasty results, because the smoothing is based on math - so its then based on the math of the WHOLE geometry. If you just select singular areas, it can smooth or straighten it out much much better/much more predictably.

I also carefully chose which max-size stroke I want to use and zoom in enough to draw a nice line at the approximately correct thickness I desire.

It doesn't really slow me down too much, because my lines don't have to be perfect the first time. I lay them in, smooth or straighten them, adjust and reduce the points, and then I can alter them to the perfectly smooth shape I want pretty quickly.

Flash 5 was still easier, though.