Is a Pen Display Worth It for 3D Sculpting

hey guys martin from flipnormals here in today's video we're doing something a little bit differently we recently purchased a huion tablet a 22 canvas plus i think it's called we're gonna be switching out the way i work usually i work on a regular intuos pro but i really wanted a pen display for a while so it's not really a review this is sort of my i guess first impressions of using a pen display like this it's the one right here in the background so i'll just be recording my thoughts and i guess me using it for the first time i haven't even peeled up the film yet but more importantly we'll be using it for sculpting a lot of the videos i've seen on youtube has been specifically for drawing and painting i haven't really seen much about using pen displays for sculpting so i hope you learned something let's jump into it so right off the bat i just want to mention that this video is solely focused on sculpting like i mentioned before there isn't really a lot of that content out there so for anyone interested in sculpting that's kind of why i wanted to do this another note is that we paid for this tablet ourselves i know people are going to ask it's not sponsored or anything i just wanted a pen display so we did out the money for this ourselves so i bought this tablet originally to get faster at sculpting and to change up the way i work after having recorded myself having watched tutorials that i've done i started to notice that my sculpting wasn't as efficient or decisive as it could have been i was doing a lot of zooming in and out rotating around the model when it wasn't really necessary it was more like it's almost like it had become a habit to just do it to sanity check so i went back and forth with myself thinking about what can i do and ultimately i landed on i guess one of the most radical things which was completely change up the way i work both in zbrush but also the hardware that i used and after searching around i kind of landed on huion as i think the best choice because it's fairly affordable and it covered all of my needs when it came to sculpting and one of the first things that i was kind of worried about was how was the ergonomics going to be i had previously used a cintiq both for work and unfortunately personal stuff and every time i did use it i always got shoulder pain or neck pain i do realize that when i was using it i was just using it with the built-in stands that they they came with i think they still do some of them where they're like angled at maybe like 15 or 20 degrees and working with that for you know four five six hours a day sitting hunched over definitely wasn't good for my body so when i saw that the huion here came with a fairly reasonable and good stand i was like okay that's that's the plus it's included in the price very very nice and i don't know the exact angles for for the stand but it folds up almost to 90 degrees and then almost flat kind of like the the cintiqs so i've been using this tablet for something like a week now and for for long durations i always try to stay within the 40 45 to 60 minute range when i'm working take a break obviously sometimes that doesn't go according to plan and i sit there for three hours and like with anything if you do that for too much you know your body will start to hurt so it's definitely important to still keep that in mind even if you do switch up your workflow like this i will say it's nice i think it's a pretty light display you know it's easy for me to move it around on my desk i already have two monitors so this kind of acts as my third i still need to figure out that whole setup but one of the things i really like about the 22 plus here is that it just comes with like a three in one cable so i just insert the one cable in the tablet and if i need to remove it or if i need to use my desk without it i just unplug that one cable and put this in the corner somewhere one thing that i have found to be a little bit tricky is when it comes to using the keyboard so for sculpting whether you're doing this in c brush mudbox or blender whatever it is you know you'll probably need a keyboard unless you have everything on screen which for me is a little impractical it's not as fast so figuring out what to do with the keyboard i went for the most obvious solution and just took my full size keyboard and put it behind the display off to the left a little bit i'm right handed so i'll use my left hand on the keyboard this is by no means ideal i'm kind of leaning towards maybe buying a smaller keyboard maybe like num pad size with a few more keys and then changing up my hotkeys in zbrush and if i need anything else i can always go over to the other full size keyboard it is a little bit tricky so if you know if you're typing uh renaming sub tools or doing any kind of writing really while the display is on your desk you kind of need to shift it around and move out the keyboard or maybe move it in front of the display in order to properly get access to it so that's definitely something to to keep in mind and purely from an ergonomics point of view when working one of the things i have noticed is that i can't keep my left arm too much to the left where the keyboard is otherwise i do feel that in my shoulder and the same thing with the hand that sort of rests on the display i have to be vigilant otherwise my wrist starts to bend upwards and you don't really want that you kind of want us your your wrist to be as stiff as possible otherwise you know you might get carpal tunnel or start to feel some pain in your wrist now moving on to comparing it to a regular pen tablet for the past i don't know 10 or 15 years i've been using a normal pen tablet wacom intuos pro i think they're called now i've used these since forever i started out with an a3 version and then i actually i guess downgraded to an a4 version because i felt like the a3 version was too big and i guess it's one of those things where you sacrifice a little precision when you go down to an a4 size but it makes it a lot more manageable on a desk now that's interesting because buying this display i didn't want something that was just a4 size i wanted something that was bigger that was the whole point of this gaining more precision but even with an a3 pen tablet and this being a 21 21 and a half inches i still feel like with the display i'm way more precise i feel more immersed when i'm sculpting it feels like i'm actually moving real clay around i can move closer and further away from the screen depending on exactly what i'm doing it's one to one meaning that wherever your pen is that's where your eye is looking so that's what you're moving it's one of those things where when you're using a pen tablet you kind of have to adjust and relearn the way you do things you have to decouple your hand from your eye and then learn where your hand is moving and track that with your eye obviously everyone who's using a pen tablet usually gets the hang of this pretty quickly but there is definitely a difference and i noticed that now going to uh a display instead like one of the things that i suffer from or suffer it's very strong word but which is an issue for me is the size now because everything is one to one and i i see it right in front of my eyes i tend to think that let's say i use a brush size of a hundred in zbrush i tend to overestimate the brush size so i think i'm actually using a size that might be a 50 whereas in reality it's actually 100 so i end up sculpting a lot bigger than i intended i'm sure this just it's a little bit of a readjustment period where you're switching from a tablet to a display but that was one of the things that i noticed that that was was pretty interesting and i want to just say that there's no better or worse piece of hardware here it's very much personal preference and you can create the exact same thing achieve the same result with both of them it just comes down to personal preference though i will say i feel like i can be more decisive and like i mentioned before i feel like more immersed in my sculpting something that someone pointed out to me when i initially started playing around with the tablet here or the display was they had an issue with their hand getting in the way and so i tried to keep that in mind whenever i was sculpting and i didn't really find that to be that much of an issue maybe i can count on one hand how many times my hand actually got in the way and then i would just sort of rotate the model and i don't know get on with my life it wasn't really it's not something i've noticed being an issue it might be further down the line but so far it seems uh it seems pretty good just for some quick numbers because i know people are curious i will so you know say disclaimer i can't fully talk about a cintiq or whatever wacom offers because i'm not working with it right now i am with the huion but one thing that i wanted to point out is that a similar tablet from wacom is twelve hundred dollars it's their 22 inch model i think and this tablet from huion is like 550 bucks so it's like half the price and i'm not sure what more you need in a tablet obviously i can't speak to durability i bought the plus version which is supposed to have some more durable resistant glass i guess time will tell how resistant that acts that actually is and again i can't really compare that when it comes to the cintiq or whatever the xp pen for example but just in terms of pricing i thought it was pretty interesting that it's like the wacom tablets are twice the price but for for what i need i think this is this is more than adequate so just quickly to sum everything up i guess like i just said i think this is the perfect tablet for sculpting i can't speak to this when it comes to painting i have seen a lot of people be very positive and given a lot of positive feedback when it comes to the painting side of it the heurion canvas 22 plus which is the one i bought comes with a new style of pen it has the three in one cable which i really like makes it easy to move around and i think i was initially a little bit worried about what is the pen gonna be like because i really like the wacom pen you know they've had like i don't know 20 years to invent uh the perfect pen but i definitely feel like huion has taken some cues from wacom when it comes to this pen i haven't used any of their other pens but i don't know i think this pin is a little bit lighter not a lot but after like 10 seconds you're fully readjusted if you've ever used a wacom pen so it hasn't really been an issue for me so as with everything in this package i really feel like it does exactly what it needs to nothing more you know install the driver plug it in and you're good to go i like the pressure sensitivity it's it's fairly easy to adjust but i've just left it at default i feel more precise with the display compared to a regular tablet and that's really one of the things that i think i've fallen the most in love with using this so far a big plus for me is that there are no side buttons uh whenever i've used my wacom tablet i've always disabled everything that's a button i only ever wanted the sculpting area or the pressure sensitive area so being able to buy this one that didn't have any buttons was really a no-brainer for me because i feel like they always get in the way i think that i was a little worried about was the for lack of a better term like the parallax effect you know the the difference between where my cursor is and where the pen is on the display but as far as i can see especially for sculpting it seems pretty one-to-one actually there's no real parallax there's no shifting so i think they nailed that pretty well it's a cheap-ish tablet still more expensive than you know an equivalent pen tablet so definitely if you're just starting out with sculpting i would recommend a pen tablet and if you feel like sculpting is something you want to get more into then i can wholeheartedly definitely recommend a a display and when it comes to the size i was a little back and forth between the 16 inch that they offer and then the with the 16 and the 22 i'm assuming the 16 is around 16 inches i landed on the 22 like i said it's 21.5 inches which is perfect for me it's great for my my desk it's a nice size like i can see everything that i need to and i can be far enough away and close up for everything that i really need to do i was a little worried about the 16 was going to be too small but i can definitely see it being advantageous especially if you have a smaller space to work on or maybe you're like moving around a lot or something like that then the 16 might be better and i think overall it feels very similar to when i've used a cintiq in the past and and so i guess my final verdict or my vertical until this point is that i don't really see a reason or a need if you're sculpting to pay a premium for a pen display when huion offers i mean this version it's it's i would say it's it's perfect for sculpting so if you are looking to get into sculpting with i in my mind more precision and be more immersed i think if you've been thinking about upgrading to a pen display the 22 canvas plus which is the one i got is is definitely definitely gets my recommendation now this isn't sort of the typical video that we do you know we don't really work with companies or or sponsors for that matter we try to keep the platform pretty clean but this was a fairly drastic upgrade especially in my workflow so we thought we wanted to do a video about this as i mentioned it's not really a review it's more my first impressions but i if you are interested in this type of video going forward do let us know in the comments and we'll definitely do our best to try to accommodate that so just remember to subscribe and leave a comment down below maybe a like if you liked the video and we'll see you guys in the next video

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 101,120

Keywords: sculpting, 3d sculpting, tablet for sculpting, huion, cintiq, huion vs cintiq, huion kamvas 22, sculpting with a tablet, 3d sculpting tablet, sculpture

Id: -XW0bqZBmPY

Length: 15min 17sec (917 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020