Does anyone from Ambient Design still read these?

[nekomata]

The issue with the crashing Docking Mode has been reported here by several users several times since 2019. I reported it directly to the support early 2020, as far as I remember. It is a very annoying thing if suddenly all Docks disappear while you are painting, and you have to reconfigure the whole GUI. markw offered a workaround to save the GUI-layout, long time ago. But it is annoying anyway.

I've had something similar happen in a different application, but if your bug report has been not answered to day with no resolution or workaround in sight, I would assume that the program issue is rooted on the OS-level (no such issue on mac across several mac os versions), and is hard to figure out.

in my experience with past ArtRage versions, reported bugs or odd tool behaviors were fixed very fast, and the team rolled out an update to address things very promptly.

As I said, I always really loved ArtRage. That's why I'm so disappointed now. I'm still glad to have ArtRage 6 and will still have an eye on the further development of ArtRage. Maybe I will purchase some future version again. But Vitae is not interesting for me.

we have roughly a year until the next release.

in the meantime, you can explore the alternatives, or you can focus on making the best out of artrage version you have.

if I remember this correctly, artrage team promised to keep artrage 6 supported for as long as it's offered for sale, so there might be a patch coming out to address your issue. I don't know. you can contact the technical support again, or message them on social media to get some clarification. they aren't very active on these boards anymore since Hannah left.

I understand the frustration, but the grass is really not always greener on the other side; artrage is still a great application with stellar paint simulation.

I'm sorry that your interface issues break your workflow so much.

[Somerset]

@nekomata
In my experience, the Docking Mode only crashes if one drags a sticker from a sticker sheet onto the canvas. I don't know if there are other things that make it crash too. In fact I use the sticker sheets sometimes, but of course not every time I'm working with ArtRage. So it is not completely useless, not to be misunderstood. To place stickers per double click doesn't cause crashes. But one has to think of it permanently. And to drag them directly to the place where you want them is much more intuitive than double clicking, what places them somewhere on the right side of the canvas. One false move and the docks are gone. In such cases it is damn annoying.

Maybe you are right that ArtRage 6 is still supported. But in fact, as I already said, there haven't been any updates since late 2019(!). I don't really believe there will be some in the future. To be honest, I already wasn't sure if it was worth it to upgrade from ArtRage 5 to 6. I don't regret that I did it anyway, because at least the Custom Brush has become better, and the Guides, but I think that the development of ArtRage is very stagnant the last years. That was what I meant with the competitors in my last posts. I'm still not absolutely sure if Rebelle 5 will fit my needs better than ArtRage 6, even it badly seems so, because I haven't tested it yet, the same with Fresco (that can't be purchased, but hired, what is annoying too), and of course Krita and MyPaint and others haven't reached the level of nativeness that ArtRage offers, as far as I know. But if you compare the progress of these apps (except MyPaint) with ArtRage's progress, you will see that their developers are much busier in making their apps better. Especially in creating features that are relevant for high quality painting. And that's what should have priority for ArtRage too, I think. But of course it is Ambient's decision what they want to do, and it is ours if we want to buy it then.

By the way, does anyone know if ArtRage 6 works well on Windows 11?

[Toniasketcher]

I have artrage 6 for windows 11. I haven't spent enough time in it to offer any real insight but the brushes are fantastic. I have noticed a freezing situation after impoting reference images not sure if it's an app issue or a file size disks space issue.

[Somerset]

Hi Toniasketcher!

Thanks for your reply. So AR 6 generally works on Win 11? That would be great. Is this freezing permanently or only for a moment? I have temporal freezings also in other apps on Windows 10 sometimes. Seems to be a Windows-related thing. But the Reference-feature is important for me.

However, I think I will have to upgrade to Win 11 anyway. If Artrage 6 will not work on it as I need it, it will be the final kick for me to change to another app. Vitae is no option for me.

Thanks again and best wishes!