Stroke
Brush Settings ▸ Stroke — stabilization, taper, and the routes that carry pen pressure and tilt into the mark.
Reference
- Tool
- Draw
- Panel
- Brush Settings
- Section
- Stroke
The Stroke section governs the stroke as a whole rather than the individual dab: how the incoming pen samples are smoothed before they become a path, how the two ends ramp in and out, and which pen inputs are allowed to reach the mark.
This section is shown for the paint tools — Draw, Shape and Vector Pen.
Controls
Smooths the pen's position before it is recorded. See below for the mechanism and the trade-off.
Stabilization is not part of the brush — it describes a hand, not a tool. The value is remembered per brush id, so a fine inking pen can carry heavy stabilization while the sketching pencil beside it carries none, and neither setting travels when the brush is exported.
The length of the ramp at each end of the stroke, over which the dab radius rises from nothing to full and falls back. The ramp is smoothstepped rather than linear, so the point does not arrive with a corner in it.
The length is absolute, in canvas points, not a fraction of the stroke. That is what lets the start taper resolve live, while the stroke is still being drawn and its total length is not yet known. The end taper can only be applied once the pen lifts and the total is known. On a stroke shorter than two ramps, each is clamped to half the total so they cannot overlap.
The slider writes the start and end together. A stroke that tapers in at one end only cannot be set from this panel.
Routes pen pressure into the dab radius. It can switch routing off, but it cannot switch it on: unchecking it flattens a pressure-sized brush, and checking it leaves a brush that ships without pressure size — a Fineliner, a Monoline — exactly as constant as it is meant to be. A brush that declares constant width is believed.
How far the radius falls at a light touch is set by Min size in Scatter & Randomize.
Routes pen pressure into the per-dab opacity, on the same terms: it disables, it does not impose.
Adds the pen's azimuth — the compass heading the pen is pointing, not how hard it is tilted — to the dab's rotation. On a round dab this does nothing visible. On the Chisel cross-section it is the whole of calligraphy: the nib keeps its orientation relative to the hand, so the stroke thins and thickens as the direction changes.
Flat Nib, Flat Wash, Dry Bristle, Charcoal, Chisel Marker and Highlighter ship with this on.
The fine tip
A brush's width curve has a knee at about 35% pressure. At and above the knee, width is exactly what the brush's own floor and pressure curve say it is — a normal working press draws the width it has always drawn. Only below the knee is the curve scaled down further, easing back to normal as it reaches the knee.
The point is variance, not thinness. Making the whole curve finer would have made the working end of every brush thinner too, which is a different brush; pinning the knee leaves the brush's character at working pressures alone and buys a much finer point out of the lightest touches.
How much finer is per brush, and it is what separates the tools:
| Brushes | The lightest touch |
|---|---|
| Painting brushes, brush pens, pointed nibs | Falls furthest — the widest range from a single stroke. |
| Calligraphy and airbrush | A large but smaller fall. |
| Pencils | A moderate fall; a pencil should still read as a pencil at a whisper. |
| Fineliner, Monoline, Mechanical Pencil, Gel Pen | None at all. A constant-width tool is constant at every pressure, which is what it is for. |
There is no slider for this. It is part of what a brush is, set per brush in the library, and a custom brush inherits it from the brush it was forked from.
What stabilization does
Raw pen samples carry hand tremor and digitiser noise. Stabilization runs an exponential
moving average over the incoming canvas position: each new sample is not used where it
arrived, but pulled a fraction of the way from the previous smoothed point toward it. At
strength s:
next = prev + (raw − prev) × (1 − s)
At 0 the raw sample passes through untouched. As the slider rises, each sample moves the point less, so the path becomes a lagging average of where the pen has been rather than a record of where it is. Curves clean up; tremor disappears; corners round off.
The trade-off is lag, and it is inherent rather than an implementation cost. The smoothed point is behind the pen tip by an amount that grows with the strength, so at high values the ink visibly trails the nib and catches up when you stop. Long, slow, deliberate curves tolerate a lot of it; fast gestural sketching and tight detail do not.
The average is applied to position only. Pressure, tilt and timing are recorded as they arrive.
Stabilize 100
The slider's 0–100 is divided by 100 and clamped to a maximum of 0.96. The top of the slider therefore applies 0.96, not 1.0. At a true 1.0 the point would never move at all — each sample would contribute nothing and the stroke would be a dot.