Hi Guys ,
Has anyone found a good solution to draw on lcd screens using markers?
I am thinking of using a 2d cel and draw on that but does the pen pressure mess the screen up? Also what is a easy to erase marker for that purpose?
Thanks in advance,
Ali
I would never draw directly on the screen. The surface is easily damaged by the chemicals in most pens. With a thin transparent foil over the display there should be no problem if you use soft and medium broad tips.
Cheers
Srek
Sheep, go down Van Ness south of market, just before Smart & Final is a plastics shop where you can buy yourself sheets of Perspex for next to nothing. Make sure you have the measurements you need though as they’ll cut them up for you at the store.
I’ve actually got a couple sitting in front of my screens, stuck on the borders using sticky backed velco (so i can easily pull em off, clean em etc). They’re serving the dual purpose of keeping the dust off the screens, and of stopping my cats from damaging the screens when they want to attack anything moving on screen, but I could additionally draw on them with marker if I wanted to.
I am thinking of using a 2d cel and draw on that but does the pen pressure mess the screen up? Also what is a easy to erase marker for that purpose?
Any pressure on the screen can damage it. mdme_sadie sounds like he has a good idea though; just as long as it’s a fairly solid piece of plastic (not sure exactly what Perspex is), and doesn’t directly contact the screen.
Just curious though, but what would you use something like that for anyway? I mean, at first thought it sounds like it might be nice. But I can’t think of any cases where it would really be practical. :shrug:
to quickly draw poses on the screen while animating , to check your arcs etc. It’ll take you 10 minutes to pose a character to try a new pose as opposed to sketching it in 4 seconds 
Try it you’ll love it.
–
cheers per , i’ll go check it out tomorrow.
Off the top of my head, I believe it’s a type of lucite that is a transparent thermoplastic acrylic resin. Ok, I looked it up. 
Do a quick search. There are plenty of programs that let you draw on your screen on top everything else.
I think Digicell’s Flipbook will let you do this. If there are some other similar apps please share them. I’m also interested in this. Especially if there is one that will let you draw over any program, or even the windows desktop.
hey sheep,
here are two apps for windows suggested by keithrsad over on Jason Schleifer’s board:
If you’re still working in Maya, Jason wrote a nifty MEL script called greasePencil which may be found >here<
*You’d think Alias would have gotten the idea already and write a fully functional tool to do this:shrug:
-mental :surprised
There’s another free one called ChalkTalk2. All of these programs including the one listed above are useless for animation purposes though for several reasons. First they all use the same flawed method. They make a buffer of the current entire desktop to use as a drawing surface and force their layers to stay on top. The result is yes you can draw away of the top of any program but you cannot interact with the underlying program while the image remains persistant on top of the app. When you want to interact with your app the drawing has to go away. Even if you wrote a version that could remain persistant over an application, feedback in the application would be extremely slow due to the method used to create the drawing surface. Secondly, none of them support multiple buffers, so you only get one image. Lastly, Ideally you’d want this application to support multiple buffers, be tied to you frame range slider, have increment and transparency settings, etc… None of the programs can do any of that. It’s a really nice idea, but in order for it to work well in an animation environemnt, it’s going to have to be integrated into the application completely.
Agreed Mcronin ,
I guess we are left with the tried and true analog method of dry erase marker on the screen.
This is the method our teacher taught us in college to draw arcs and stuff. This method is great and very useful so I’d just stick with this metho0d since its faster easier and doesn’t take resources other than the energy needed to uncap a dry erase marker and draw on your screen. Ive never tried it with an LCD before, definately gonna try it.
I played with this screen draw , which was great and it would be totally usable if there was a way to switch the same drawing on and off , but once you close it it puts it to clipboard and you have to draw again.
A bunch of us used to write on the screens with dry erase when I worked at Blue Sky. One day, I left a goofy message on my buddy’s screen. When I was away from my desk, he quickly scribbled a goofy message on my screen, but he grabbed a sharpie rather than a dry erase marker.
An hour later and a whole lot of rubbing alcohol later, the screen still didn’t look 100% right.
http://www.dotnetmasters.com/SampleCode/ChalkTalk2.zip
You can get ChalkTalk2 here. The drawing you make will not disappear when you minimize ChalTalk, like it does with ScreenDraw. Still has the same limitations I mentioned above.
This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.