Illustrator messes up curves while drawing with tablet

Question

I don't know if its my Computer [Windows 7 64bit] or if its the tablet [Wacom Bamboo Pen]. But when I try to draw smooth curves in AI, it stops then continues to draw messes up the curves.

Inside of the red circles, they are suppose to be smooth drawn curves, but there not. [This happens about 80% of the time] Does anybody know a way to stop this from happening?

Answer 1

Are these examples of a continuos stroke or are you stopping the movement and then continuing it?

• You can continue drawing the same line if you select it previously and then draw nearby with the brush or pencil.

If not,
a reason for these breaks might be that you are releasing pressure at a certain point and therefore a new line is started when pressure is incremented again. Resulting in two strokes instead of one.

I too have Windows 7 (you meant x64, right?) and had some trouble with the drivers. Pressure would not be registered in certain programs. I found out that the ink utility (handwriting recognition and on screen writing) generated some sort of conflict with the wacom driver. After deactivating the windows tablet service and reinstalling the wacom drivers this was fixed.

The las thing that occurs to me is that you might accidentally nudge your mouse or activate the trackpad etc?

I have an Intuos 4 and so far have had no problems with continuous strokes. I drew more or less complex drawings completely in Illustrator and have had no problems (after fixing the drivers issue).

//Edit You might also want to have a look at the fidelity and smoothness options available when double-clicking the brush or pen icons

Answer 2

You should look to see if there is a an update for your tablet's driver software and your version of Illustrator.

I don't know how your pen strokes are represented in Illustrator, but Illustrator is a vector-illustration application at its core and a stroke in Illustrator isn't the same kind of stroke you would get in Photoshop, a raster-image-based application, which effectively means a pixel-for-pixel representation.

I would imagine there is some pretty weird math going on in either the tablet driver or in Illustrator to convert brush strokes into Bezier curves on-the-fly.

Answer 3

There might be some low-level operating system service running, hogging CPU cycles frequently but always when you're drawing. Turn off anything to do with networking, bluetooth, I don't know what else. (Remember to turn them back on when done.)