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Thread: Oil Brush Impasto Scaling option?

  1. #1
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    Mar 2017
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    Oil Brush Impasto Scaling option?

    Hi again, I'm back.

    I've recently been developing some work that's meant to be printed largeish (~4 feet wide) at 300 dpi, but I've found that at 300 dpi the simulated brush texture is almost invisibly small. Is there a way to just scale that up semi-smoothly? For example Painter's thick paint brush crap has that "Brush Density" slider that increases the number of bristles that it simulates for a brush of a certain size, at a computational price. It's sort of heartbreaking because I vastly prefer the way AR's impasto works, but at 300dpi it looks like I'm painting impasto with kolinsky sable. How plausible would it be to take the existing brush texture that's applied on strokes and just scale it so the impasto grooves are normal brush size at fancy printing pixel densities?
    Last edited by mr_reidpants; 12-01-2017 at 06:26 AM. Reason: imagine, a title that relates to the topic of the thread

  2. #2
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    I'm not sure how corel are handling this thing exactly - I couldn't launch most recent painter after closing it once, so my experience with it got cut off right there,

    older painter brushes used to scale up horribly, tho

    (I also never used impasto in that program, it always got the tone and color wrong after impasto layer got applied. no such issue in artrage.)


    if I were you, I would paint at either half or one third (even a quarter) of required final resolution and than simply upscale and sharpen the work, to make individual bristles stand out more.

    there is also a workaround with recording a script and playing it later on a bigger resolution document that often gets recommended on these boards - look it up, but I'm not sure it affects the physical bristle strand size.

  3. #3
    Join Date
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    ArtRage's impasto brushes used actual depth, but the maximum depth ('height raised off the canvas') is capped, so the wider the brush gets, the flatter it will look. While this is something we are looking into improving for future editions, it's just at the stage where computer capabilities are making it possible to go well past what ArtRage's brushes were originally designed for.

    So unfortunately, you can't scale the bump (texture/depth) up along with the brush size.


    Note: DPI is actually not a size, just a print quality measurement, what you are actually doing is telling ArtRage to change the canvas pixel (screen) size to make sure it is large enough to print at the size/quality you want. So while we understand what is happening in this example, canvas pixels would usually be a lot more helpful

  4. #4
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    Painter 2018 added that "Real Thick Paint" thing, and in a lot of ways it's pretty impressive? It has a lot of sliders and it seems like there are some positions and brush configurations that are almost ArtRagey, although the way their brush engine deals with the sides can lead to some strange colour transitions. Some of the brushes totally look like blurry trash at the sizes that I'm using them, but for the most part you can keep the bristle size consistent across the painting by turning up the "brush density" slider when you scale up the brush. It's actually really frustrating to use, and it's only usably fast on my 14400x10800 file because I have one of those beefy kaby lake i7s, but I think I'll be able to make some acceptable marks with it.

    I tried upscaling/sharpening thing on a previous piece, just a 2:1. Photoshop's bicubic was meh; I even tried breaking it up into three smaller successive ones. The result was ok for an outdoor exhibition where it was basically an eye-grabber that nobody would buy, but having it on my wall, I can see weird pixelated parts from two feet away, and even with sharpening the details aren't crisp.

    I also tried the script angle, and it almost worked.

  5. #5
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    painter brushes are known for having a lot of settings and sliders, yes.

    if you can manage painting something tangible with the real thicc paint, by all means go for it.


    Quote Originally Posted by mr_reidpants View Post
    having it on my wall, I can see weird pixelated parts from two feet away, and even with sharpening the details aren't crisp.
    this sure is not a printing/file compression issue?

    you'll obviously have extra-blurriness when upscaling images, but having done the same thing more than once (I do overpaint quite a bit, but no impasto work after upscaling), my prints at 240 DPI always came out beautiful when viewed at any distance.

  6. #6
    Join Date
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    We have already just entered an age where ANY visible pixels or pixellization is quite simply unacceptable in any digital media (unless on purpose).

    All digital painting software producers are keenly aware of this and are trying to figure out how to tackle things such as paint on canvas simulation in a way which appears as resolution independent as possible and exhibits minimal pixel / aliasing/ etc. artifacts. Standard computing platforms continue to advance in the west (third world computing platforms do not drive the software market, at least not for the "A" grade software). Blurriness at the edges in Corel's new thick paint algorithm is just another a side effect of this ongoing challenge... another aspect of the difficulty showing through the cracks and each software shows this in its own way. Some for example show high degrees of pixelized aliasing highlighting on 45 degree angled impasto strokes others show marked straight edges in tight curved strokes.

    In the future these problems WILL be solved by someone, maybe by some smart inventor with a go getter attitude. In the end the demands and pocketbooks of artist consumers will motivate the creation of value, of software which really can replace paint and do everything it can do... the question really is only who and when.

  7. #7
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    Mar 2017
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    Yeah my problem was that the original was made for 200DPI, which looked perfectly sharp on my printing guy's printer and the paper I was using. Upscaling that was effectively 100DPI, and was trash. Like, the brush impasto was the right size, but all of the details were gone.

    This time around I have a sort of unique problem though. For the last round I was making small prints referencing larger originals, so the fact that the impasto was smaller than it should have been just created the illusion that there was a larger original somewhere, which was kind of cool (I've been asked where the originals are for the first set at least a hundred times). But this round I'm making the works large enough to plausibly look like originals, and printed at 300DPI the AR impasto would be *tiny* and it would start fighting with the scale of the work. Natural media simulation at print res basically means I'm stuck with painter for now :/.

    At this point I more or less have the hang of all of the sliders on the Real Thick Paint and Real Bristle panels, so I can almost get the brushstrokes that I want and I know which ones I'm never going to get. But still... I set up this nice scumbling brush that should be about 2" wide on the canvas, and it takes whole seconds to render strokes. I found some tricks to improve the performance while making the same marks but still.

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