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Thread: How would you compare ArtRage to Kritta or MyPaint?

  1. #11
    Join Date
    Dec 2011
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    Columbus/Ohio/USA
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    1,778
    wrong place

  2. #12
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Location
    Rochester, New York
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    My favorite digital painting choices would be: Art Rage, Corel Painter, MyPaint.

    Art Rage was the first digital painting experience for me. Have always liked the virtual reality experience of natural media you get with Art Rage. For instance, the Paint Tube used in combination with a palette knife is truly identical to a natural media experience. I worked with natural media acrylics, oils, drawing pencils, pastels, tempera, and bulletin sign paint many years ago. The transition over to digital software was a completely different and new experience. Art Rage was a good transitional software program to start since it has a lot of similar feel to natural media artwork tools. Over the years Art Rage has added a lot of additional features that make it a good choice for anyone seriously interested in digital painting and drawing.

    MyPaint is a very good program for digital painting and drawing. This program has a lot of of excellent brushes plus some additional ones you can find online. MyPaint is one of my favorites due to the portability and freedom you have using this software. MyPaint is available for almost all Linux operating systems such as Fedora, Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, AV Linux and most other flavors where you have an Xorg or Wayland GUI and access to repositories either through DVD/USB thumb drive purchase, or online web site. MyPaint can even be installed on a thumb drive for .exe execution and running through an installation you place within a directory on the thumb drive using a Windows operating system. This is convenient for moving around on different hardware machines with a similar and sometimes earlier or later Windows operating system if not skipping too many generations of releases. In my opinion from experimenting through trial and error MyPaint has the best probability of having a compatible graphics tablet that will work providing pressure sensitivity. I have the least amount of problems with different models of tablets (Wacom, Huion) using MyPaint on different operating systems. Some programs are highly restrictive and do not offer much support for a large variety of graphics tablets, they will either not run at all or have limited ability for use with straight solid brush strokes and no pressure sensitivity as a result of running the operating systems generic driver for graphics tablets. MyPaint does have limitations when it comes to editing features yet the recent GIMP Image Manipulation Program 2.10 release series has included a special menu option within the brush category for MyPaint brushes. You can also save a finished artwork piece created with MyPaint and save in the native format .ora that is recognizable within the Krita or GIMP Image Manipulation Program for working on any editing necessities.

    Krita is a good program yet my personal experience has yet to finish anything of completed serious endeavor, hopefully in the future I will find time to do such. This program does have a lot of editing tools and some vector capabilities. This program also has a lot of very good portability and freedom use similar to MyPaint. For use with Linux operating systems there is an additional advantage of simple to open and use appimage execution files that work off thumb drives or directories within operating systems including Windows. This type of portability advantage is especially good if say for instance you want to work at a library computer that does not have this program installed on their network, you have the ability to run the program as a standalone with the computer you are using on the network by installing an .exe installation file within a directory on your personal thumb drive or sometimes simply running the appimge file on a Linux operating system. This is great for this type of public situation since next time you may be on another computer within the same network and will have the ability to use the portability feature of running off a thumb drive you insert into a usb port. Attempting to install the program on that terminal of the network would most likely involve some special administrative privileges since things could get totally out of control with hundreds of different programs if each individual scheduled for a time session were able to install on that hardware computer whatever programs they wanted to run and did not uninstall after their time use was over.

    Versions 5 and 6 of Art Rage will also run off a thumb drive so long as you are using the same type of Windows operating system when moving from one computer to another. The catch here is to remember to bring your license product code key with you since anytime you attempt to run the program it will ask for that product Art Rage Serial Number to prove your purchase. Again a second catch is during the start up installation of the .exe Art Rage file you have to redirect where you want to install the program from the Windows C drive to the location on your thumb drive, use a folder you create with the Art Rage title so all the extracted files are within that folder. Do not simply redirect the installation of the extracted files onto the thumb drive folder top level or else you will have a mess of files extracted all over the place that will be a nuisance if you have other files and folders on that thumb drive. You can also run Art Rage 6 on Linux by installing through the Wine application on some Linux operating systems. Art Rage Vitae has a limitation here since it is only available through the Microsoft store, programs are limited to where you can use them when installed through the Microsoft store, good luck even trying to find where it is installed on your computer. Overall performance and stability are a good positive thing about Art Rage Vitae.

    I will not make any comments about my other favorite program Corel Painter since that is not what you have asked a question about.

    If you are using a Mac operating system I cannot provide any personal experience opinion since I have not worked with any Apple computers since my college days of labs back in the late 1980's and early 1990's with the very first model hardware desktops.
    Last edited by Stephen Lo Piano; 07-20-2022 at 10:20 AM.
    I have a personally designed artwork gallery website at: www.stephenlopiano.com
    There is one section full of pages there under the Digital Artwork category that is devoted entirely to paintings I have created with Art Rage.

  3. #13
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    Mar 2019
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    Quote Originally Posted by Slap Happy Larry View Post
    Alongside Artrage I use Affinity Designer to do graphic design stuff. Even though I'm not a vector illustrator, I need it for the advanced font options and a few other things.
    Interesting. I use Affinity Photo and am about to pull the trigger on Designer. I wish someone made a single program that combined the rich featues of the Affinity products with those of ArtRage. What fun that would be!

    I'm not an illustrator, I'm not a photographer and I'm not a painter. I'm a budding digital artist (as a retirement pursuit). Give me one program that does vector & image as well as Affinity and painting as well as ArtRage and I'll be a happy camper.

    Quote Originally Posted by Slap Happy Larry View Post
    I use Paintstorm Studio to make repeatable patterns.
    Could you tell me why you use this specific program and how it helps with this task?

    Thanks!

  4. #14
    Join Date
    Apr 2019
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    4
    Krita is really good, I used SAI before and I can see that Krita is much more powerful. Again, Photoshop costs money, so Krita is the real thing because it's free.

  5. #15
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    Apr 2022
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    I like Vitae, don't get me wrong, but I got into painting wanting to play "Bob Ross", like many others I'm sure have done lol. I was really disappointed, that the palette knife in AR doesn't function at all like what we saw Bob do in his painting series. Just recently I tried Krita and some a set of brushes I found on Deviant art, and it was -light goes off! this is it! The palette knife breaks were perfect for doing mountains etc., and there were several knives to choose from in that pack of brushes. So, if you haven't heard of this or tried it before, it's a free app and well worth getting!

  6. #16
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    Mar 2019
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    Quote Originally Posted by Sloth 451 View Post
    I like Vitae, don't get me wrong, but I got into painting wanting to play "Bob Ross", like many others I'm sure have done lol. I was really disappointed, that the palette knife in AR doesn't function at all like what we saw Bob do in his painting series. Just recently I tried Krita and some a set of brushes I found on Deviant art, and it was -light goes off! this is it! The palette knife breaks were perfect for doing mountains etc., and there were several knives to choose from in that pack of brushes. So, if you haven't heard of this or tried it before, it's a free app and well worth getting!
    I, too, am interested in doing Bob Ross style paintings. I just downloaded Krita, but found several brush sets on Deviant Art. Can you tell me which set has the palette knives you're using?

  7. #17
    Join Date
    Jun 2019
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    176
    I think, the choice between MyPaint, Krita and ArtRage should depend on what and how you like to paint. And of course how much you want to pay for it. MyPaint, like ArtRage, has a very overseeable interface, while Krita has much more dialog panels and functions in the menu bar and the context bar. But MyPaint looks a little rustic and its brush engine is not as sophisticated as ArtRage's. ArtRage also has some features MyPaint doesn't offer, like e.g. stencils and stickers, a reference window (you can use PureRef or IrfanView for that, but it is not so convenient) and the GUI-Layout is comparatively rigid. Another Pro of ArtRage are the Tool Boxes, in which you can save all the colours, Tool Presets, Reference Images etc. you used in a document.

    On the other hand, Krita has colour management and also supports CMYK. That is a big Pro. MyPaint and ArtRage haven't. And there are some filters and tools for image editing in Krita. It also has a Timeline for creating animations. But as far as I know, it doesn't support file types like *.gif or *.mp4, so that you need an additional software like VirtualDub to really make animations outoff it.

    One thing is totally different in MyPaint and Krita on one side and ArtRage on the other: ArtRage has one brush for oils, one for watercolours, one Airbrush, one for pastels..., Krita and MyPaint have lots of brushes for each of it. And it is sometimes a matter of opinion what really looks like an oil brush, watercolour brush etc.

    The easiest to learn is MyPaint. You will need a lot of time to learn Krita. Even Krita's layer system is comparatively complicated. But that's the price for the huge amount of opportunities. For me, Krita initially comes too overloaded, but fortunately it can be customized with so called "Workspaces", like also Photoshop and Affinity Photo have. It means that you can customize the GUI-Layout how you like and need it, save your Layouts and load them with just one click. So you can have different layouts for different needs. E.g. one for painting, one for animation, one for drawing, one for image editing... That makes the GUI much more overseeable and convenient.

    MyPaint's development is very slow. The newest version is from 2011. In opposite to it, Krita's developers are very busy. Much more than the ArtRage developers, as it seems. ArtRage's development had the wrong priorities during the last years, in my opinion. But neither MyPaint, nor Krita offer these thick paint application and its interaction with the canvas textures and lighting. As far as I remember there was at least one brush in Krita that had a thick paint application. But it is not the same.

    All three apps are nice in their own way, and you can paint great paintings with each of them. I personally still prefer ArtRage 6 for painting, but I have them all.

    By the way, I also use Affinity Photo and GIMP. And you can paint with them too. But you can't blend colours into each other while you paint. You need the Smear Tool or the Colour Blend Tool (Affinity Photo) for it. So it is not like authentic painting.

  8. #18
    Join Date
    Dec 2021
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    8
    I've used Jasc Paintshop Pro, OpenCanvas, Sai, MyPaint, Krita, ArtRage, PaintStorm Studio (very inexpensive and amazing brush engine if you haven't seen it before), CSP, Photoshop, and on and on. You can do a lot with any of these programs and can get similar results with all of them, depending on how you apply technique. The thing is that software preference is ultimately about personal comfort, so it's very hard to give any direct advice on. Free programs are a great place to start finding out what you find comfortable and uncomfortable (minus the usual learning pains) without having to make a commitment. If you end up falling in love with something with you can just fill the gaps in whatever software you use with photo editing programs like Gimp, Paint.net, Affinity Photo/Designer, PS, etc.

    Between the three you mentioned Krita is the closest to an all-in-one solution, but a lot of the default brushes barely begin to scratch the surface of what the brush engine is capable of, which means that if you want it to compare to ArtRage brushes you have some work ahead of you (till someone makes a painting focused brush pack anyway). Both ArtRage and MyPaint have nice, but different, default brush sets and have more simple UIs that let you focus on drawing and painting instead of technical aspects of art creation. Personally, PaintStorm is my current favorite because of the brush engine, default brushes, and the customizable UI, but I spend most of my time in MyPaint and Krita because my work computer is a potato. I still use ArtRage occasionally, but I have AR4 and don't like the prospects of upgrading to 6 with no possible upgrade path for me after (MS store doesn't work for me). Beyond that feeling it out is a really good way to go.

  9. #19
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    Oct 2016
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    Quote Originally Posted by snout View Post
    I have AR4 and don't like the prospects of upgrading to 6 with no possible upgrade path for me after (MS store doesn't work for me). Beyond that feeling it out is a really good way to go.
    I just want to say that you're missing out a lot if you're still on artrage 4.

    artrage 5 itself was a very massive upgrade, 6 kind of felt like an expansion pack for artrage 5 - I upgraded to 5 very fast, but hesitated with upgrading to 6, and I kinda regret being late.

    the performance is better (particularly, better than 4), you can work with several documents at once, and there's a very impressive custom brush tool, that got a paint depth support in artrage 6. it literally kills any other app out there on the market trying to simulate thick paint, and I more or less tried them all.

    paintstorm and clip studio are both very lovely (I dab into storm once in a while, and CSP is my 2nd go-to painting app), but there's really nothing out there comparable to artrage once you get hooked on it. it has its downsides, but it pioneered so much stuff in the real-media CG painting apps, and when artrage does things right, there's really no competition to me tbh.

    it's not a photoshop killer, or not a jack of all trades like paintstorm, krita, affinity, etc., but it still excels at paint simulation.

  10. #20
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    Dec 2021
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    Quote Originally Posted by nekomata View Post
    I just want to say that you're missing out a lot if you're still on artrage 4.
    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.

    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.
    Last edited by snout; 08-27-2022 at 05:15 PM.

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