I'm sure I am, but the point of my response was how picking software you daily drive is very personal and that I have enough experience to know how little feature hype matters over comfort. AR has gone way off the path I fell in love with them for so I suppose I'll share why I no longer support giving them money personally. The upgrade to 4 was huge and I loved it, but they are worlds from the company they were then and are much more corporate now.Originally Posted by nekomata
As it currently stands they don't let you compare legacy versions on the website anymore or let you use upgrade pricing. So, they've made sure that with 6 I have no idea what exactly I'd be getting out of the upgrade and it's going to cost me 50USD, which is more expensive than software with more features that are still getting feature updates. I assume if 5 or 6 had anything that truly grabbed me I would have gotten them already, cause I didn't hesitate with 4 and I wanted Vitae right away. They won't sell unsupported versions of Vitae through the legacy store either though, despite there being many ways they could do that that would add nothing to the support ticked burden they used as reasoning for excuse. This implies to me that they are trying to change their business model or perhaps even to make the company more attractive to potential buyers. I could spend just a little more on programs that still get feature updates and use actual fluid field simulations, are resolution independent, and more true to life or even get something truly different from other software like BlackInk. So, they have gone out of their way to choose a very unattractive price point for legacy software, especially when 4 is already starting to have trouble working with Windows updates and more big ones are around the corner. The same deterioration will happen to 6, so I assume they know what they're doing by handling it this way and intentionally want to push out their old market.
In the past they beat the competition by doing worse simulations faster, but good enough, and selling for far less. They were a scrappy underdog that was friendly and affordable and that drew in a lot of people. They were far and away from innovative or pioneering on anything relating to painting simulation even at the start, since a lot of this stuff is from dusty papers from the 60s and 70s or even earlier, but that didn't matter because they focused on the user experience and making it fast and fun. Now AR is not cheap, fast, or even good at simulation by today's standards. There was a brief period their anti-aliasing on impasto effects surpassed Painter's, but that didn't last long. Now, you can get Freshpaint for free and it's both more accurate and runs on older hardware than Vitae. The most innovative thing AR did was the more user friendly UI/UX in an art program, but that's becoming common now too. Vitae offers collaboration, but the app store doesn't work for me or people I'd collaborate with consistently enough (and it's slower) so I'd rather just use something I know works like DrawPile. I can't think of any features AR has pioneered at all or even just notably advanced enough to be called innovative. They're not really independent anymore either so I don't have much reason to make the sort of price point exceptions that I might for something like PaintTool Sai.
To address the improvements you mentioned. I haven't really had performance problems with AR4. "Performance improvements" can really go either way depending on how they mean. On the only device I got the Vitae demo to work on it was considerably slower than AR4 and I had problems I've never experienced in AR before like angular stroke segments, so I'm wary about that rather than excited (if it's not broken, why fix it?). Being able to open multiple files isn't really something I do in any program normally so it isn't something I've been looking for out of it. I find AR's impasto effects to be very fake looking in general. DeepPaint 2 predates the first AR by a year and had the lighting simulation on impasto down better than AR6 seems to despite it being ten years later... so adding impasto to the custom brush engine isn't a big deal to me, the custom brushes are plenty powerful in 4. AR also isn't very good at depth painting to me in general because the feedback is poor compared to actual paint and it causes me to make mistakes I'd never make with real paint, like scraping areas of the canvas bare when trying to blend or the "bristles" behaving in strange and unpredictable ways (I can use a visualizer in more modern simulations). ZBrush had depth painting down in some of its earliest versions and was extremely fast, before AR ever existed, and no one has really bothered to dethrone them to this day in my opinion.
I don't want to scare new people off from AR, new AR is for a different crowd and I always stand by people using what they love to create with, but it's obvious to me that I'm no longer the target audience or they would have non-hostile answers for simple questions about sales model changes that could be handled differently at no detriment to them. I've run businesses and I've written software, so my standards mean that you have to be exceptional to excuse a lot of practices and not even Photoshop passes that bar for me.
I imagine the only way I will fall in love with any one tool is if it's one I made for myself, but that is years off I think, otherwise I'm happy to just think of them as tools and use them as I see fit rather than giving them my love. For now I'll be content contributing to MyPaint development and looking at other projects that interest me. I now mostly use AR for leisure painting because it's harder to paint with accurately and better for experimenting in. Clients generally don't want to pay for the extra cost of things made in it either, because many of them don't care about the painterly look and want high polish instead. I can occasionally get someone to buy a digital oil, but it's usually so they don't have to pay me for material costs... the rare stingy but not too stingy client.
Reply With Quote
