Custom Designer Brush Lag

[pai]

Hi,

Now, I have created few brushes from AR5 brush designer tool. I only use 2048x2048 preset default basic canvas to test these strokes. I found out whenever I blend colors or even just continuously few strokes, it lags a lot and have that loading % bar running frequently. Like I have to pause every stroke I put down on canvas now. Even I zoom in like 300%, it's the same

Am I missing something to be able to run these custom brushes more smoothly?

Using Windows 7
i7-3770, 32MB Ram

93441

93442

[HannahRage]

The custom brush has a lot of different settings, some of which can be quite memory intensive. If you combine them the wrong way, things can get very slow, but it usually just takes a little tweaking to make them usable. It can be very fast for some presets, it's entirely a matter of which settings you are using.

Main culprits:

- dab spacing. The closer together the dabs (lower the spacing), the faster the stroke has to load new images. Increasing it even by a couple of percent can make a big difference (0% spacing is doing 100x more than 100% spacing).
- post processing effects like smoothing and taper (which it doesn't look like you are using)
- pick up colour is quite memory intensive as it has to calculate all the colour changes constantly, so adjusting that setting may help
- very large brush head/grain (> 500kb file size) will definitely slow things down. Keep the image as small as possible. Very large tool sizes may also cause problems (the larger it is, the more memory it uses).

[pai]

Great to know more about how custom designer tool works.

I do use smoothing and taper a lot too when creating my brushes but do adjusting while painting, as it lets you do so.
In other words, is that meant to create the brush head/brush gain, the best size is NO greater than 1024x1024?

I do use a lot big brush strokes both just paint or blend, my way of working...and large canvas too. Does that mean only increasing my RAM will run more faster on using custom designer brushes ?

Thanks again for detail explanations.

[markw]

You may not have seen the post in the following link pai (as the thread it’s in is actually about over saturated colours when blending) but post 20 may be of interest to you.
Link: https://forums.artrage.com/showthread.php?52921-The-Weird-Saturation-Thing&p=518224#post518224
In it AR user nekomata shares a few tips on making a custom brush.
One of the things in there that stood out to me was the size of the brush head image he used, only 250x250px.
Could be worth you experimenting with how much smaller you could go with yours and if it reduces brush lag.
I wonder if there is an optimum image size in terms of pixels for the Brush Designer to use?

[pai]

Hi markw,

Thanks so much for providing that thread link :). That's a very useful discussion and more understood how the Brush Designer tool works now.
I think I can try to create and test more different sizes of brush head/grains combination to see if I can come close to the rich oil paint look with bigger/longer brush strokes/brush sizes for my style.



You may not have seen the post in the following link pai (as the thread it’s in is actually about over saturated colours when blending) but post 20 may be of interest to you.
Link: https://forums.artrage.com/showthread.php?52921-The-Weird-Saturation-Thing&p=518224#post518224
In it AR user nekomata shares a few tips on making a custom brush.
One of the things in there that stood out to me was the size of the brush head image he used, only 250x250px.
Could be worth you experimenting with how much smaller you could go with yours and if it reduces brush lag.
I wonder if there is an optimum image size in terms of pixels for the Brush Designer to use?

[Enug]

I make my brush head/grain images 150x150px - may not give you the effect you are looking for but just to show that you can go quite small.

[HannahRage]

Great to know more about how custom designer tool works.

I do use smoothing and taper a lot too when creating my brushes but do adjusting while painting, as it lets you do so.
In other words, is that meant to create the brush head/brush gain, the best size is NO greater than 1024x1024?

I do use a lot big brush strokes both just paint or blend, my way of working...and large canvas too. Does that mean only increasing my RAM will run more faster on using custom designer brushes ?

Thanks again for detail explanations.

As discussed above, 1024 is pretty big, try half that. You only need a very large head if you need that size effect. But the actual file size is more important than the resolution - test some heads at different sizes.

Smoothing & Taper may be most of your problem though - they're generally best for neat inking brushes without many fancy effects at small sizes. Linework, basically. More RAM would definitely help.