Setting the Textured Brush Resolution

An important thing to take in consideration when drawing with textured brushes is that, contrary to solid vector brushes, textured brushes store their texture in bitmap data, which is stored in individual pixels. This implies that, where solid vector artwork can be scaled and zoomed in without issue, textured brush strokes are resolution dependent, and are liable to lose quality and appear pixelated if they are enlarged or zoomed in.

By default, textured brush strokes have a pixel density of 100%. At this density, when your scene is not zoomed in and your artwork is not scaled up, each pixel in the textured brush strokes corresponds to one pixel in the rendered image. Scaling it up or zooming in will require Harmony to render several pixels using the same pixel from the brush stroke's texture, making the artwork lose quality.

Hence, before you start drawing using textured brushes, it is important to consider if you will need to zoom onto or scale up your artwork, and set the pixel density accordingly. For example, if you intend to scale your bitmap artwork up to 300%, or if you intend to zoom in from 12 fields to 4 fields, you should make sure the pixel density for your textured brush strokes is of at least 300% before you start drawing.

You can specify the pixel density for textured brushes at the scene level or at the drawing level:

  • Setting the pixel density at the scene level will make newly created drawings have the specified pixel density, but it will not change the pixel density of existing textured artwork.
  • Setting the pixel density at the drawing level will allow you to change the pixel density of existing drawings, but will not affect the pixel density of drawings created afterward.
NOTE In Paint, you cannot set the pixel density of textured brush strokes for the whole scene, since Paint is only able to modify individual drawings. You can only change the pixel density of textured brush strokes in existing drawings. If you need to make this change for the whole scene, open the scene in Harmony and refer to the Harmony documentation.
NOTE If you are drawing on a bitmap layer, you must set the pixel density and canvas size for bitmap artwork instead—see Setting the Bitmap Resolution.