Smooth / straighten tool options

Feature Suggestions
#1

Back in the days of Flash, when I was trying to draw with a mouse there were two tools (tool options) that I simply loved. It allowed me to be pretty loose with my drawing, and then “fix” my wobbly lines with those - smooth and straighten!

At least I think that’s what they were called, I am talking about those two options here:

Untitled

No idea what algorithm those options were using, but it was a great help when drawing. Another benefit of them was that you applied the effect after you have drawn your line, so it wasn’t as CPU intensive as constant smoothing.

Any chance of implementing those?

Edit: You can see their use in action in this youtube video.

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#2

Hey I remember this feature! This was definitely a big part of what gave the Flash drawing tools their very squishy “Flash” feeling. Love it.

I think this would be a really nice addition, and would be very straightforward to implement. We use paper.js to process SVG, and luckily paper.js comes with a lot of path smoothing/simplification routines.

The harder part, I think, is finding an appropriate place in the interface to put these options. We want to make sure the interface stays fairly simple (especially for beginners!) so we’ll need space somewhere for options like these and others that are in the works (boolean operations, offsetting, etc).

I’ll be working with @Luxapodular on the design process for this, but if you have any ideas please feel free to post them! We’d love the help~

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#3

I am looking forward to it. I thought I will have to go and look for the algorithms that were used in Flash, but it seems paper.js will handle it.

I think stuff like that should go into the Inspector panel. We have some empty space there and we can only do it on a selected drawing. It can also be modal (it wouldn’t show up when selecting a CLIP, only a drawing). I can easily see either making some of the panel either collapsible (with little arrows) or or makes the whole panel scrollable.

I would put icons for BOOL operators there, as well as Z axis icons.

Currently there are two buttons there - Make interactive and Make Animation. Wouldn’t it be better to have a single button to make a CLIP, and then a pop-up window would let you choose if you want animation, interactive clip, button, etc. Also, aren’t they the same? Can’t you add code to animation CLIP and animation to interactive CLIP?

If that’s the case, I would see the pop-up have a vanilla CLIP and pre-fabs/templates (like button, animation, and whatever else will be added).

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