Capitalizing on the emergence of the touchscreen tablet and stylus as a drafting tool, Morpholio has released the brand new, patent-pending ScalePen, which provides a new way to draw on their popular iPad app, “Trace” (available in the App Store). The ScalePen simultaneously checks the drawing scale and iPad zoom level and offers an array of pens that respond as you move through the drawing. The result “brings precision and clarity to line weight, and gives architects the ability to make beautiful sketches at multiple scales, within a single drawing, set of layers, or layouts.”
Architects and designers through the ages have been using line weight to convey the space, detail, and hierarchy of three dimensions in the form of two dimensional drawing. The ScalePen revolutionizes the way architects produce and edit drawings on tablets. The app includes eight different types of pens, including a pencil, charcoal, and a brush, which allows for all different types of drawings to be produced.
For example, start out with a site plan and you are given ten different pen sizes:
Zoom in to view a plan of a house and use a completely new set which matches the new scale:
Zoom back out to the site plan and the original pens return:
Draw a building detail and zoom in and out without adjusting your pen:
The app and pen combination addresses a lack of consistency in the “telescoping virtual realm”; before the creation of this technology, line weights proportional to drawing scales have been almost impossible to keep consistent. “We needed a solution that would translate this crucial and precise language into the intuitive and tactile mobile tools that architects and creatives are relying on more and more every day,” explains Toru Hasegawa, Morpholio co-creator.
Mark Collins, also a Morpholio co-creator, commented on the need for the ScalePen saying, “In the expanding digital drawing world, a one-size-fits-all approach of sliders for controlling line weight just doesn't cut it for those that are used to fine-tuning their lines, or those working in dynamic drawings such as architects.”
Update: Our friends at Morpholio are offering 10 lucky ArchDaily readers the chance to win a full Trace Pro Free subscription for a year! Enter below. Winners will be announced on March 31st, 2016!
