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tripclaw · Posted: Wed Jan 24, 2001 11:29 am

Hi. I'm really loving Painter 6, but it seems to lag behind a lot when i use larger brush sizes.. I have a pentium III 733 with 128mb so i was wondering what is it that is holding my computer behind ? would another 128mb stick be the answer, or CPU upgrade ? RAM is pretty cheap right now so i could afford that..

tripclaw · Posted: Wed Jan 24, 2001 8:04 pm

by larger brushes i mean starting at 20, getting really bad at 30, and beyond that is unusable, too lagged with the waterbrush.

and i usually make my images 1000x1000..

so its probably not a RAM issue then? its only about $40 for an extra 128mb these day, but i dont want to do it if its un-needed.

Ko · Posted: Wed Jan 24, 2001 11:42 pm

Hmnn....
Doesn't sound like a memory problem!
People are getting very mixed performance from Painter, even on highend systems... it's very weird.
I'm beginning to suspect that the graphics card is a factor to be considered too!
What card are you using? PCI or AGP?

Ko

Ko · Posted: Thu Jan 25, 2001 12:33 am

What do you mean by "larger brush sizes"? ...30-40 or 200pixels?
What tools are you using... oils?
And what resolution do you work with?

more RAM wouldn't help unless you are working at very high resolutions.

Ko

quaternius · Posted: Thu Jan 25, 2001 8:49 am

Ko -
I think maybe you're onto something there with the graphics card. I've got 3dlabs oxygen VX1 cards in a similarly powered PIII with 512 megs of ram and I don't seem to be experiencing the lag problems everyone is taking about. Even at larger brush sizes the lag is only a little, and I'm generally over 3000 pixels with images. But then I tend to stay away from the complex brushes too. I usually keep my brushes simple and fast - have made a number of brush variants to help keep things fast also.

More food for thought.

Q

tripclaw · Posted: Thu Jan 25, 2001 11:00 am

I have a GeForce2 MX 32mb card... hmm wonder if thats the problem then. It's AGP 2X (had to limit it to 2X do to bugs in my asus mainboard).

Anyone have a libary of brushes they're willing to share with me ?

I haven't quite figured all the brush settings out, using the defaults.

Freddio · Posted: Fri Jan 26, 2001 5:26 am

the mx is only 2x anyway

Guy · Posted: Fri Jan 26, 2001 9:30 am

i have an athlon 700 with 128 ram and a tnt 2 pro and painter 6 runs smooth.. smoother then PS6. do you have a lot of things running in the back ground or in your taskbar?

quaternius · Posted: Fri Jan 26, 2001 9:53 am

geez - someone could write a whole book on painter brushes. I took one whole saturday and did nothing but change brush settings 'till I could figure out what the heck was going on. So where do I start? I'll take a quick stab it it, bear with me...

Flat Dab type/Single stroke type brushes are fast-painting brushes. Just as an example, Open your brush control panel general tab, choose the Opaque Flat brush and see what happens. Start changing the size of the brush 'till the lag is unacceptable - for me that's about at size 75. Now try changing the Dab type to circular - it should be faster, I don't get appreciable lag 'til I'm over size 550. (Don't forget to reset your default variant before changing this brush to a pencil, or something else.)Okay, here's a watercolor variant I use a lot - on my machine I don't get bothersome lag 'til I'm over size 135: Dab type/circular, stroke/single, method/wet, subcatagory/grainy wet abrasive, opacity 29%, grain 24% (the lower the grain value the more grainy you get),size 60, min.size 24%, size step 5%, Expression Tab - size/pressure, jitter/none, opacity/pressure, grain/pressure, color/none, angle/none, resat/pressure, bleed/pressure - check invert box on bleed. On the WELL Tab - resat 25%, bleed 60%,dryout to max. On Water Tab set your diffusion and wet fringe as you like, mine's set for 0 diffusion and 22% wet fringe. On your brushes window click on the variant pull-down and save your new variant with a new name - don't forget to reset your original default variant. I might've change some other setting I've overlooked, but you can experiment with other settings yourself.

I strongly recommend getting the Painter 6 WOW book - there's a whole chapter on brushes in there. Watercolor brushes can be a bit more complicated because they use the special watercolor "layer" - that's one reason why Jason Manley (to name just one person), starts with a smaller image and just blocks out general shapes with watercolor, before he resizes the image to keep working on it.

A couple of the best links for Painter stuff are these: http://users.sinewave.com/sherdyl/credits/paintlnk.htm
http://home.earthlink.net/~athene/painter/

On the video card issue, the GeForce should be fine, hmmm... check your RAMDAC speed specs though - the GeForce should be over 300MHz I think, which should be fine. The only thing I can think of is the GeForce is intended primarily as a 3D gaming card - while my 3DLabs cards are not so specifically oriented. There may be something else going on. For other reasons, it could never hurt to bump your RAM to 256 Megs - and who knows, it might help Painter run faster for some unknown reason.

Sheesh, I should be workin' - I got bunches of stuff to get done today.
Good Luck and Happy Painting.

Q