I'm going to an art school to study animation and am looking at a few tablet PC's to do my work on. (I'm a 2-D enthusiast, but I will be working on some 3-D animation also.) I'm wondering if anyone here has used one of these, how easy they are to use, and what recommendations someone may have. I'm trying to decide between the Motion LE 1600, the Thinkpad Tablet, the HP Compaq tablet, and a few Toshiba ones. Again, if anyone has any advice, I'd like to hear it!
Hello Sparticus, and welcome to the AWN Forums.
I just bought a Toshiba Tecra M4 Tablet about three months ago. I posted wrote up a review of it on my Animation Mentor Blog. You can check it out here: http://erikgirndt.blogspot.com/
If you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer them if I can.
Aloha,
the Ape
...we must all face a choice, between what is right... and what is easy."
erik, thanks for that great review on your blog. i'm planning on getting one that was a big help. especially that you can run maya.
Thanks! Now, does the lag time that you mentioned become very noticeable during gesture drawings? Ideally, I'd like to be able to use the computer as a sketchpad as well as an animation workstation.
Hey Animated Ape,
I tried a Toshiba Satallite tablet at Best Buy yesterday and was very unimpressed with the screen sensitivity. I would draw light, sketchy marks on the screen and sometimes they'd show up and sometimes they wouldn't. When I draw, I usually do a really light pre-drawing, and then layer another set of lines over that and so on until I have my sketch. So, I 'd need a really sensitive screen to work with. I'm not sure whether you have run into sensitivity problems with your Tecra or not, but I'd be interested to hear how consistently the pc registers your really light pen marks. Thanks!
I got a Tecra a few months ago, the main reason I would go with a Tecra over the others is screen resolution. The Tecra and Portege are 1400x1050, all the other tablets I've seen are 1024x768. The Tecra is heavier than the Portege and has shorter battery life, but it has a larger screen and better/faster parts.
Spartacus, the screen probably isn't as sensitive as you would like. I find I have to press harder to get a light line than I would with pencil and paper. You get used to it though, it's just like learning to use a different medium (pencil vs pen vs pastel etc). Sketchbook Pro is awesome for sketching, but I prefer to clean up in Photoshop, I don't know why but I feel like I get better control over my lines.
Some apps don't quite work properly with the tablet driver. Wacom has a legacy driver you can download to trick older apps into thinking you're using a regular tablet, but it only works for the standard screen orientation (apps that use the TabletPC driver will still work in any orientation) and some apps draw the line offset from the cursor making it impossible to get a precise line. I've had this problem with ToonBoom Studio 2.5, Plastic Animation Paper, and the Mirage demo.
I would also suggest you add a wireless keyboard to your budget. When drawing in tablet mode the keyboard is covered, and wired keyboards get in the way. A wireless mouse is a good idea too.