Art Programs- user reviews and preferences

Yep.
Rebelle has a good fluid simulaton.
It just doesn't take into consideration that watercolour is a semi transparent medium and in real life brushstrokes of different colours build up in a way that makes the colours duller and darker though.
Painter works better in that regard, but it's even more resource heavy.

 

Here's a nice vid of someone using Rebelle 3:


Interestingly in the comments section, people profess their love of Rebelle's water color treatment over Corel's, but they don't mention specifics or address the duller/darker issue that @Azzart brings up.

He has quite a few videos on the program:
https://www.youtube.com/user/EscapeMotions/videos

@thatcomicsguy, I think this is the last place where people would think "Having No Life". Everyone here has too many tablets and programs. Now my non-art friends might think that, but they watch a lot of sports which makes me think that they have no life...

 

It means they don't care or they have never used watercolour once.
In rebelle you can paint a spot with a dark colour and then paint over it with yellow and it'll build-up and cover the dark spot, which is impossible in watercolour.
The liquid effect though is very nice.

Being a software that requires a lot of cpu power to the point the computer fries when I try to work on something that's print size (like say, an A3 at 300dpi) and since the max brush size is incredibly small, it's a software that would be useless for my needs. It could be a nice sketching software if it costed 20 and didn't suck my computer battery and make its fans running wild the whole time.
As it is, I can only admire it from a distance.


Edit:
P.s.
I was watching the video and damn, he's just killed the ink of his drawing with that unprofessional way of getting rid of the blue sketch lines. Aaargh my poor eyes!

 

I think it might have been a timing issue, broadly speaking.

That is, when I tried Corel Painter, it was around five years ago, and my hardware wasn't smart or fast enough to handle the real time water color effects, -which were the main draw for me to be trying Painter out in the first place. It essentially flooded my itty bitty Core 2 Duo with way too much math and locked everything up. I filed the experience under, "Not ready yet" and forgot about it.

Rebelle 3 might not be as technically clever, (though I bet there has been some advancement in the area of simulated particle physics or whatever it is that such software performs, over the last half decade), -but the critical thing is that now I own hardware which is finally able to run that kind of code effectively and without lag. So now when I see simulated water colour running down my simulated canvas, I think, "Whoa! It's ready. Hooray!" -and jumped aboard without giving Corel a second thought.

Poor Corel.

They were the early developer and promoter, did all the early leg work in the technology, and like many others before them, (look up "Ampex" the American company which did all the real work to bring us video tape recorder tech), were not the ones to win accolades or reap the rewards. Corel has, since its inception, felt a little tragic around the edges in everything it has done.

But maybe I'm over stating things. Corel has plenty of users, don't they?

 

I've been one of them 5-6 years ago and going back.
It was a great software back then when I was the kind of person who wanted an oil paint feeling in his painting software.
My core 2 duo couldn't handle the cooler features of the software though.

 

Given how popular and robust CSP is I don't usually get to talk about Painter much, but it remains my favorite for the classic paintbrush & canvas "analog feel".

A great resource is Skip Allen's blog with arguably the richest set of fan-made brushes and tutorial videos I've ever seen for a single art program.

One of my favorite brush sets is Skip's Buttery Oils, here being reviewed by Tim Shelbourne:

https://videopress.com/embed/MtI2qyg0

 

I'm not sure about others but I dropped painter the moment I bought a version of it that had more pop-ups begging you to buy extra stuff than a webpage in the early '00s. I miss it sometimes but what they've done to the new versions is kind of sad.

 

I would think so!

For basic 2D raster graphics, you'd be vastly over-powered with a modern gaming rig, (but.., does that really matter? Every computer is vastly over-powered for most basic functions these days). -For professional 2D animation however, and especially for 3D sculpting and animation, you pretty much need a modern gaming rig, and even then you will probably still find yourself hurting for more muscle.

 

Ok just got a chance to try these out in Affinity Photo 1.6.4.104 compared to PS CC 2018 trial version.

You're right, most brushes behave differently by default in AP, but I found one trick on the Affinity forums, where if you set the Texture Mode to "Nozzle" you can restore the PS behavior for some brushes:



Some brushes like the "Ink Big" brush in the pack you linked, I cannot get working properly. But oddly, the similar "Ink Small" brush can be made to work like in PS, using the "Nozzle" mode setting.

This leads me to believe that this a problem with AP's scaling of the nozzle texture relative to brush size.

According to this thread, you can also adjust the Spacing value of some brushes to equalize behavior, but many options like "Jitter" parameters are not implemented yet in AP.

 

Expresii is on sale for 30% off right now in the microsoft Store as well as online (where it is about $7 more). I find it makes my Surface fans go crazy as my machine heats up, but dang, is it realistic looking and fun to play with. I feel like it is kind of glitchy (mine installed in Chinese and I had a devil of a time figuring out how to change it), and it randomly resized its window while I was working, but I sort of want to get it while it is on sale. Do any of you have experience with it? It looks like the watercolors blend more realistically than Rebelle 3.



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