I bought myself a New Tablet
From 2016 to the end of this year I’ve been using an Ugee 2150 tablet which has done a great job but I felt it was time to upgrade for a few reasons. The screen is pretty basic, the pen has no tilt functionality and the pressure sensitivity level was only 2048. Despite this I had a great time with it and apart from in 3D Coat it continued to work very well in most of my programs.
I had been using a Wacom Intuos 3 before that, which actually had slightly better pressure sensitivity and tilt function with the pen but I was having trouble drawing with it and relating to the monitor. having the monitor combined tablet helped with my hand eye coordination when drawing digitally. I know some people don’t like them but I do- I’m used to drawing on paper and I have a astigmatism and short shortsightedness issue with my eyes which I have to wear glasses for. Not sure if that ever affected my drawing but it probably did to some extent.
I’ve bought a Huion Kamvas 22 Plus which was the one I felt within my budget and a significant upgrade from the Ugee I’ve been using. My main reasons apart from affordability were that it has tilt support, a better screen with anti glare (no reflections is welcome), higher pressure sensitivity, less parallax and more up to date driver support for all my programs. The pen doesn’t need a battery with is great.
One of my pens batteries for the Ugee 2150 recently melted so I thought it might be a good time to upgrade. It was impossible to get more replacement pen nibs for it as well, although you can get replacement compatible pens for it from China.
I disabled the Windows Ink setting in the driver settings and configured all my programs to use the tablet driver (wintab) instead of Windows Ink. So far it seems to work great in everything I use- ZBrush, 3D Coat, Krita, Corel Painter, Clip Studio Paint etc.
I hadn’t realized how much having the tilt function and extra pressure sensitivity level changes the way some brushes in digital painting behave. This was never too much of an issue with older brushes but tilt support does seem to be more important in recent years, some brushes in Krita were just unusable for me with the Ugee 2150.
Now the RGBA brushes and charcoal brushes I’ve been using (Ramon Miranda’s sets) behave very differently. Corel Painter feels like a better program with the tilt support as well- especially for the bristle brushes and palette knives.
It will be interesting painting with the new tablet and seeing how it works in different software, I’ll keep you updated with how I’m doing with it. Hopefully I will get many years of use from it like I did the Ugee 2150.