This is Scribble Kibble, a weekly show about animation, and this episode is a review of
a brand new Huion WH1409, a big, wireless drawing tablet.
This tablet works wonderfully.
I was impressed by how nice my digital lines looked in all five of the programs I tried
it in.
It’s times like these I kind of regret spending all the money I did on my Cintiq, because
honestly a non-display tablet like this works so well and feels more natural on your drawing
hand than the glass surface of a display tablet.
But it does lack some special features of expensive tablets, like an eraser end on the
pen (which I never use anyway), and automatic reprogramming of the shortcut buttons depending
on which program you have open (which I use all the time), AND I did have to do some unexpected
things to install and program the Huion tablet.
This video will show you what
those were.
Hm.
Okay.
The driver won’t install because of wintab32.dll
in System32, and that file is there because of my Wacom tablet.
Well.
It looks like you can’t have both tablets installed at the same time, so I’m just
going to copy and paste this file in a backup area.
Hopefully Huion can create its own wintab32 file now.
Great.
Flip the power switch on the tablet itself and plug in the little USB.
Now if I open up the application here, I can customize my settings.
I’m going to set pen pressure to what I like.
Try it out in Flash, and wow, that’s a nice scribble.
The end is too thick, so I’ll bop back here and adjust it again.
Excellent.
This is really nice.
I like it.
The big drawing area is so much nicer than the tiny 6” wide drawing area on that 10-year-old
white tablet I showed you.
I thought it would take time to get used to the big area but it didn’t.
So far this is great.
The lines I’m getting are beautiful and smooth with fine pointed ends in Flash.
And that’s saying something.
I’m curious about how I can program the buttons on the left side of my tablet.
Shortcut buttons are magical for quickly undoing things and picking tools without needing to
move my hands to the keyboard.
Well, where are the settings?
Manual…
This manual is much more instructive than what came in the box.
I recommend using this manual if you come across problems.
Hm.
Settings should be here, but they’re not.
If you’ve never owned a tablet before, this nonsense is normal by the way.
After more struggling I figured out to program the keys you have to right click on the icon
and choose Run As Administrator.
This whole misadventure was Windows’ fault.
Alright, let’s program these buttons for animating in Flash.
And they work now.
Excellent.
One thing the Huion WH1409 cannot do is change the express keys per program.
Some of the more expensive tablets can swap the button settings depending on which program
you have open.
This is really important if you draw in tons of different programs because all of the default
shortcuts are different.
Flash and Toon Boom don’t even work the same way, for example.
If you want to change what the keys mean for every program on your Huion, you have to manually
import and export key settings here.
I tried the tablet in a few different programs and no matter which one I use, it works wonderfully
without me having to go in and reprogram the pressure sensitivity.
The wireless feature of the tablet is also great because it gets rid of cable clutter
and lets you position the tablet anywhere nearby to draw, but it does mean you have
to charge both the tablet and the pen after about 40 hours of use.
That you need to charge the pen at all is new to me.
On my other two tablets the pen works on its own, but those tablets are not wireless so
that must be the difference.
For the Huion, if for some reason you don’t want it wireless, you can plug it in with
the USB cable no problem.
Overall once I got past the installation tricks, this tablet made me really happy.
I would like to know how well it lasts over the years after lots of drawing.
If you have a Huion WH1409 and have been using it for a while, write your experience in the
comments and I’ll pin the most useful one to the top of the page!