Any reason to use a Cintiq vs. a non-screen tablet for 3D work?

pablohotsauce

I waffle between wanting to do 2D work and 3D work for a living. It's been mostly 2D the last couple years, but lately I'm thinking 3D is a better choice for me, for a number of reasons I won't go into. Anyway, I've been using a 13" Cintiq for 2D work for a good long while, and I just don't like it as much as my normal Intuos. For whatever reason, I'm way more accurate on an Intuos, especially for detail work / fine linework. Maybe, *maybe* the Cintiq is better for thumbnailing, or getting overall rough sketches down a little more accurately because of the slightly better hand-eye coordination, but in general I'm just not seeing a huge benefit like others seem to, you know?

Given that, is there any compelling reason for me to keep the Cintiq for 3D work, for sculpting or texture painting or [X]? Or am I fine sticking w/ a standard tablet? I searched for relevant threads here, didn't really see anything.

Thanks!

monster

If you like tablets, that's totally fine. It's what I use. Since I only do some light texturing sometimes.

I'm willing to bet though if you tried a 22, 24, or 27 inch Cintiq you'd be thinking differently. They are much less cramped and the resolution is higher. I know a lot of artists that were very uncomfortable with the Cintiq at first, but now they can't live without it.

pablohotsauce

It's actually the Companion 2 that I mess around with, so the res is super high, but yeah, the screen is just 13".

And it just now hit me: Cintiqs are good for working on detail zoomed in, a.k.a. drawing with large motions, in order to compensate for the crappy parallax. But my default drawing style on paper is to draw small, doing fine detail with small wrist motions. I could probably get used to working zoomed in + large, and maybe a larger Cintiq would feel better than a 13" model, but ... eh. Until the tech in the Cintiq catches up (read: much lower parallax, and better pen-to-screen calibration, and maybe even a thinner pen + nib), I'm not sure I'd be into it.

My dream device would be something with almost zero parallax. I wonder how an iPad Pro would feel. I hear the parallax is much better.

But again, I dunno that any of this matters much for 3D. I'm thinking about fiddly comics line-art / inking for the above, not painting textures. Painting is much more forgiving. I haven't tried sculpting yet, though...

Scruples

I like to rotate the screen I'm working on depending on what it is to get a different wrist angle.

pablohotsauce

Yeah that's cool, but I think only the 22" lets you rotate the screen, right? I guess you could also mount the screen on a fancy rotating support arm.

But that's all moot, since lots of drawing programs let you rotate the canvas/view to arbitrary degrees now. I think Photoshop has had it since CS4, for example. I actually had the Rotate View Tool mapped to one of the buttons on the Cintiq. Really useful.

musashidan

If you've tried both and are more comfortable, confident, and accurate on an intuos, then I think it should be obvious. And it makes no odds if it's 3d, they both do the exact same job, albeit in a different fashion as you're well aware. 

thomasp

i guess it depends what type of 3D work you are doing. i sculpt a lot myself but still rely on a good deal of hotkeys. the solutions from cintiq users that i have seen for good keyboard access when using the big models did not convince me. perhaps it's acceptable if you actually spend all day in Z and photoshop though and are fine with the onscreen radial menu system that wacom offers and the onscreen keyboard for most cases.

pablohotsauce

@musashidan: guess not. I'm less experienced w/ 3D than 2D, so I didn't know if there was some benefit of Cintiqs that I was overlooking.

@thomasp: yeah, I had a mini wireless keyboard hooked up to the Cintiq pretty much all the time. I didn't mind it. I could do 90% of what I needed to in Photoshop and CLIP Studio by using just the buttons on the Cintiq itself, but the keyboard was definitely necessary. And those programs are simple compared to 3D apps. I can't imagine getting by in 3ds max using just the Cintiq's buttons. :P I have a million custom keyboard shortcuts set up. (Although why would I be using Max w/ a Cintiq, haha?) I haven't learned Zbrush yet, but I imagine it's similarly complex, and I'd set up a lot of custom shortcuts, like you say. I'll see how Zbrush feels with a normal Intuos. Gotta imagine it'll do just fine.

So I'm not hearing a lot of love for Cintiqs. Good to know.