When I worked on adding tablet support to GHOST, Blender’s low-level input system (alongside Nicholas Bishop and Andrea Weikert who did the X11 and Windows versions), one thing I had in mind was the possibilities not only in the obvious painting and sculpting, but in other more experimental areas too. I’ve got a few ideas sketched down about potential uses in the interface, for example imagine sliders that changed in precision depending on tablet pressure, or a radial menu that uses the tablet tilt information to bias what option is selected.
A tablet, especially one that supports tilt sensitivity like the Wacom Intuos, is almost a poor man’s 3d input device. With X/Y location, pressure and tilt, you can derive a lot of information about the pen’s situation in 3D space. This is interesting to me, because unlike real 3D input devices like spaceballs (which I don’t own), many CG artists have tablets, so input methods involving a tablet can involve a much larger audience than the more obscure devices, and so investigating it doesn’t feel like such a waste of time :).
Anyway, the idea came to me that Blender’s built-in game engine could be very useful as a quick, interactive means of testing these different ways of interacting with a tablet. Over the weekend I had a hunt through it’s unfamiliar source code, and hacked together a patch that adds pressure and tilt support to the game engine’s mouse sensor (available here). It exposes these variables through Python and works very similarly to the way you currently get the mouse’s position, with three new functions: getPressure, getXtilt() and getYtilt().
So of course I had to do a first test! This one is very simple, just visualising the pen 3D space as a virtual pen over a virtual tablet surface. I mapped the pressure to the ‘height’ of the pen along it’s own local axis, and the tilt data is changing the orientation. Watch the video I recorded on a digital camera and see for yourself! The .blend file for it is here, but you’ll need to build Blender with my patch for it to work.
After doing this I’ve got a few more interesting ideas for things, such as FPS-style mouse navigation with the tablet but with tilt controlling other things like roll or turning around, or perhaps a marble madness style game where you use the pen to tilt the surface that the marbles roll around. I’m now also curious to combine this with my PowerMate for some really interesting interaction. Let me know if you have some other ideas that could work too! :)
