Goodbye

[petrnita]

After fierce combat with this program I decided to change the painting software.
There are several reasons but three are the most important ...

1 ArtRage has not yet solved its great deficiency which is magnify. In painting is unacceptable to not be able to work on the details. And in ArtRage you can not work on the detail of the image. This is due to the fact that the magnification is associated with the smoothing. This diametrical problem should be removed in the first versions.

2 ArtRage is so slow that work with tools larger than the 100 it becomes practically impossible (unless you have super-fast computer).

3 Because I am a strong supporter of Windiows XP, any further upgrades are beyond me. So even if something has changed for the better I will not be able to benefit from this. It's a shame that the company so quickly turned from the owners of XP. But surely they have an interest.

Thank you all for your kind evaluation.
Greetings to all and I wish you the beautiful images.

[petrnita]

This is a maximum magnify in ArtRage:



... and maximum in Paint Tool SAI:



Clearly, ArtRage in image magnification lost all the details so the artist does not have control over them.

[markw]

What are the dpi and canvas dimensions of the .ptg file you have shown there?
If you want lots of fine detail then you will need a higher canvas dpi.
The dimensions of the canvas also matter if you want to paint very small objects.

Here are some pictures of a pomegranate.
It's just a small part of a painting on an A3 sized canvas @300dpi.
If it was in the real world the pomegranate on this canvas would be 60mm across.
If I zoom in to 800% magnification I can now see ⅛mm devisions on the ruler.
Is this not detailed enough?

[petrnita]

So ... this is a larger format at 300 dpi in AR4:



... And it's the same in Paint Tool SAI:



The difference can be seen immediately. I think you agree with me.

[Gms9810]

I draw at 18 inches by 24 inches at 600 ppi routinely and I never have problems. I think you're unjustly putting AR down. My standard canvas is 6000 x 4800 (10x8) at 600 ppi. It's not fair to condemn AR because your system can't keep up.

[Henry Stahle]

Here is an answer:
http://forums.artrage.com/showthread...513#post479513

[jmac]

petrnita...Your condemnation of ArtRage on the 3 points you listed is completely unfounded.

1. With regard to magnification and "working on details", if you are getting the kind of pixelation you are showing here the fault lies with the settings you have chosen, not the software. I have had no problem zooming in to significant magnification and working on detailed portions and I have never heard of anyone else here having such a problem

2. With regard to slow performance, if your computer is slowing down to the point the program is unusable with tools larger than 100, then that is a reflection of the hardware you have, not the software you are trying to run on it. If you are unable to afford a newer computer I can certainly relate but that is not the fault of ArtRage.

3. With regard to support for Windows XP, I believe there is a version of ArtRage that the developers have kept available specifically for XP users, something they really were under no obligation to do. I believe it is available in the downloads section of the members area. Someone can correct me if I am wrong. You can choose to be "a committed supporter of Windows XP" but that is your choice and the result is that you will be left behind when it comes to both hardware and software advances. That is the nature of technology. There were many people who were strong supporters of the horse and wagon but most of them eventually saw the advantages of motorized transport and when they were able, made the change.

I run ArtRage on a mac. It is a phenomenal program and I am sorry you are having difficulty getting the results you want. I would encourage you to make contact here with the issues you are having and I have no doubt that you will get the help you need to get as much from the program, given your hardware and operating constraints, as possible.

[MattRage]

We specifically didn't do pixel zooming in ArtRage because we wanted to pull away from the process of tweaking at a pixel level and stick with a more direct expressive approach that better suits the nature of the tools we developed.

Oddly enough, that feature (and the complete lack of zoom in ArtRage 1) generated some fantastic feedback from professors teaching art in universities - It was the strangest email I remember receiving, thanking us for not allowing their students to zoom in and tweak. As soon as you can, you feel obliged to, and in their case it was preferable to move away from that and encourage their students to work with the imperfections. Obviously that's not right for everyone's needs and we're not making any value judgements on either approach, but our choice was to focus on the macro level of interaction and we believe it has made this particular product stronger. We don't have any plans to remove the sampling on zoom.

Regarding speed - That's probably a direct result of the older 4.0 engine that was only 32-bit and the fact that ArtRage manages much more data than just colour in order to simulate paint interactions across the board. This ties in to our need to drop XP support in 4.5. The ability to develop modern applications that fully support current operating systems is severely hampered by attempts to support XP. The development tools available now do not readily support the older OS and make it almost impossible to take advantage of modern systems if you try. We tried and it was just too much work.

If we had maintained support for XP we may well not have been able to produce the 64 bit version and we would not have been able to take advantage of a number of newer OS features that we are using to improve the product. It was a simple, if frustrating choice. We chose to continue expanding and improving the product for the majority of the user base, which unfortunately necessitated dropping XP support in the process. It was not a quick or easy decision and certainly not a quick turnaround given the age of the operating system - We could have done it back with 4.0 but we chose to keep going at that point.

I hope that helps explain our position!

[petrnita]

As you can see in my post, I'm not saying that ArtRage is a bad program. I'm just saying it does not fit my requirements. But this is my personal problem and therefore looking for themselves another.
As for magnification, not very convincing to me your arguments. The paint should be fairly flexible to different needs of users. I even have a book that I bought the year before, in which the author one course digital painting in ArtRage doing a sketch and the rest of the work ends in Painter ... says it is the inability to refine the details in ArtRage.
But it's probably a matter of taste and not for me to judge whether it is good or not.

As far as the speed is Pain Tool SAI works without a problem and at the largest sizes of tools so it's probably not really fault my computer.

And on Windows XP, it is in the world 33% of computers have XP system and for now there are very few programs that have abandoned entirely the XP system. And if it is, at least they are doing upgrades to XP. I would not be surprised if ArtRage 5 was only for Win7 / 8, but the upgrade from version 4? Unfortunately I can not see what's so great about the new upgrade but unless advised to deal with my computer it is probably some big changes

Do not be angry for my observations. I do not say this in the wrong. I am only sorry that I have to (at least for now) to part of the program that the first steps in a digital painting I loved it. But more and more deficiencies prevents me grow and learn painting. This is my own opinion and do not impose it to anyone. Yours

Sorry for my English.

[MattRage]

I'm certainly not angry at your post, I can understand your point of view - I hope also that can you see from my previous post that we understand that not everybody wants to work the way we provide and as I said we simply believe that for ArtRage specifically and the nature of the tools we developed we have chosen the best approach. We are not a pixel editor and our tools are not appropriate for pixel editing. We are also very happy for people to use other applications to complete paintings started in ArtRage, every product has its strengths and weaknesses - We provide a low cost solution partially so that people can easily pick up our product to work with alongside others and partially so that anyone can afford to get in to it.

I haven't used SAI myself but I believe it's a flat colour painting application, it applies colour to the canvas only. ArtRage manages additional data such as the volume of paint on the canvas and brush, how wet it is, how reflective it is, and other properties as part of the paint simulation. As a result, we're pushing around anywhere up to five times as much data so tools may well go slower, especially in the 32 bit version that was built before the latest build tools became available.

The free 4.5 upgrade's main feature is 64-bit which gives us a huge speed increase over 4.0 and the potential to work on much larger canvases. That change is also the change that led us to dropping XP support. I believe the 33% figure may include embedded XP systems, and the standard 24% figure for XP coverage quoted for desktop systems includes business systems which are outside our market base anyway. That aside, as I said previously, we did not make the choice because we wanted to, we made it because it was the only way to provide the significant performance improvements that we were able to provide in 4.5. The development tools provided by the OS vendor simply do not allow us to maintain support for the older OS without significant additional overhead that we are just not big enough to provide.

So - We're sorry that we are unable to support your system, but unfortunately in our situation we had no choice but to drop support for XP in this update. We do however still provide the 4.0 version for you to download if required or if you do not believe that 4.5 has any updates you need.