The RealBristle™ system represents a major milestone for digital painting, with the ability to respond to pressure, speed, rotation, tilt and bearing

— just like real-life brushes.

Intuitive Multi-Touch Wacom support also allows you to pan, rotate, zoom and more, creating a realistic and immersive digital art experience that puts you in control.

In this tutorial we are going to show you how to use the new Brush-Tracking utility to control and customize pressure-sensitive memory to virtually any brush.

A visual power curve captures every moment and every line on your canvas, just like you would with real world art materials.

We have just opened the Brush Tracking window from the Welcome screen, which opens by default whenever we launch Painter.

But if you need to get back in to Brush Tracking at any point, then we have a couple of options.

The Help > Welcome... command will take us back into the Brush Tracking window.

Brush Tracking can also be accessed through Painter’s preferences:

Under: Edit > Preferences > Brush Tracking (PC)

Or on a Macintosh: Corel Painter 2015 > Preferences > Brush Tracking

And finally, we can also use the shortcut-key CTRL+SHIFT+, (or CMD+SHIFT+, MAC OS).

When you draw with traditional media, the amount of pressure that you use with a tool determines the density and width of your strokes.

Using a pressure-sensitive stylus with Corel Painter gives you the same kind of control.

Because each artist uses a different strength or pressure level in a stroke, you can adjust Corel Painter to match your stroke strength for all brushes

by using the Brush Tracking preferences, or for a specific brush, by using the Brush Calibration controls.

Do I really need to use Brush Tracking?

A good indicator that you need to adjust your Brush Tracking preferences is when you are getting abrupt changes in the width or density of your strokes.

Adjusting the Brush Tracking in this case, will give you a much smoother transition in stroke width as you gradually apply more pressure.

Also, if a light stroke leaves no color on the canvas, you can use Brush Tracking to increase sensitivity for all brushes.

It’s worth noting at this point, that the Brush Tracking we set up here, will be applied to all Brush variants.

To apply the Brush Tracking settings to the current Brush variant only, all we need to do is to check the box ‘Apply to current brush variant’.

If this box is left unchecked, the settings are applied to all brushes.

Why would I want to set up Brush Tracking for individual brushes?

You might need a light touch, for example, when sketching with a pencil brush variant,

but need more pressure when using an oil paint brush variant.

Corel Painter saves Brush Calibration control settings with the brush variant, so whatever sensitivity you set

will be the default the next time you choose the brush variant.

If you set Brush Calibration for a specific brush in addition to general Brush Tracking preferences,

the Brush Calibration settings override the Brush Tracking preferences.

Corel Painter saves Brush Tracking between sessions, so whatever tracking sensitivity you set will be the default the next time you open the application.

So lets apply some Brush Tracking and try the previous stroke again.

The most common way of adjusting brush tracking is to apply a typical brushstroke, such as a wavy stroke, to the scratch pad.

Use the pressure and speed you prefer when drawing or painting.

Corel Painter then uses your stroke to calculate the appropriate pressure and velocity settings for all brush variants - or in this case, a specific brush variant.

If you are using a Wacom-compatible tablet, you can also apply brushstrokes in the document to preview the results and make adjustments as needed.

However, you can also specify pressure and velocity values by adjusting the Velocity-, Scale- and Power- slider-bars.

As a general rule, to achieve a full pressure range with a softer or harder touch move the Scale and Power sliders in the Pressure area.

To achieve a full velocity range with a slower or faster motion move the Scale and Power sliders in the Velocity area.

In addition, Corel Painter includes the following brush tracking presets that you can choose from: Default, Legacy, and Linear.

The Default preset is suitable for most artists and also provides a good starting point for brush tracking adjustments.

The Legacy preset was the default brush tracking in Corel Painter X3 and earlier versions.

And finally, the Linear preset gives you pressure changes which impact the brushstroke in a linear fashion,

where each small variation in pen pressure changes the brushstroke.

Once you have set up Brush Tracking, although saved as the default settings for the next time you launch the program,

you might nevertheless still want to save these as a custom preset that you can choose at any time from the Presets drop-down list.

To save as a new preset, just click on the ‘+’ sign, add a preset name and click on Save.

To remove any presets, just select the preset from the drop-down list and click on the ‘-‘ sign.

Finally, I would like to show you one more fast method of calibrating the brush settings for individual brush variants.

Press CTRL+B (or CMD+B on the MAC), to open up the Brush Controls panel.

Click on the Brush Calibration tab, and then on the "Set Brush Calibration Settings" icon.

We hope that you enjoyed this tutorial on Brush Tracking and please do join us for our next video

where we will be showing you some of the great, new content included with Corel Painter 2015.