Receiving a drawing from a wacom tablet

Stephane Morisse's icon

I work with a friend drawing 'live' on paper and a tablet. For the tablet part, I would like to be able to get his drawing inside my patch to analyze it for sonification (for example using dark / clear zones ratio). I already use iOr to get x y z pressure and tilt data from his laptop using udp. How could I also receive the drawing and materialize it ? lcd ?

Nate's icon

The lcd object works very well for this. However you might want to use jit.mgraphics if you will be analyzing the image as it will already be in matrix format.

Stephane Morisse's icon

Thanks for pointing me to that jit object, will have a look at it. Is there a way with lcd to get the thickness or shape of the "pen" ?

Stephane Morisse's icon

jit.mgraphics seems vector based only ? Had a look at jit.lcd also.

Nate's icon

You can certainly set the thickness and shape of the pen with lcd. One cool thing about all three of those objects is you can use images as your "brush" and paint with them. You can also create drawing functions to define your own shapes etc.

jit.mgraphics is vector based, but outputs a matrix.

Here is an example of using a wacom tablet for drawing with jit.mgraphics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB5XAA_n12E

Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.

Hope I am understanding your question correctly!

Stephane Morisse's icon

This goes in the right direction. But the real idea is : one person drawing on the tablet. Until now, he used photoshop to do it but we may use another software. Ideally, I would like him to be able to change tools and thickness / painting style with keystroke so that he doesn't go out of the drawing surface, and not seeing the arrow pointer. Then receiving the drawing result on another laptop to work on sound. Thanks for your patch. I'm going to try this tomorrow (full day of work today 9 AM to 2 AM !!!). What do you use jit.cell for ?

Stephane Morisse's icon

sorry to bump but...

Nate's icon

Please be a little more specific. I understand that that the idea is to have someone drawing on a tablet. You have said that you already have the data coming into max via udp. Did you check out the little example patch I provided? If you replace the position data from the tablet with the [r mouseposifdownormove] you will be painting without the pesky arrow pointer.

I put jit.cellblock there to make it clear that after the jit.mgraphics object you are working with ARGB data as you said that you might do some analysis on dark vs clear zones. If that was not clear please draw something in the upper left corner of the pwindow and you will see what I mean.

The video link shows the use of a wacom tablet for drawing and used a midi controller to modify the drawing parameters without having to go out of the drawing surface. You may want to consider using some sort of continuous controller to change thickness etc. rather than keystrokes. Or map the tilt to the line thickness.

Take it easy.

Stephane Morisse's icon

Thanks a lot Nate, couldn't test it because the pen of my tablet is broken. That's why I asked about the pointer. I'm gonna test this tomorrow as day job hours as sound tech pile up...