Painter 7 acting sluggish

[Tedsuo]

Hey all,

I've noticed I get really sluggish feedback using a number of the brushes in Painter 7. While this is to be expected using such a heavy duty graphics program, I feel like it's acting more sluggish than it should. I have a PIII 1Ghz, NVIDIA GEFORCE 4 Ti4600, and 524 MB of RAM. Is sluggish response to be expected when using a wacom at say 1600x1600 resolution, or are there any optimization tricks to get faster response? And advice would be appreciated.

[Deth Jester]

I wish I could help you optimize.. but I have a 800 mhz and I get similar problems only when I am working with large brushes on a large canvas.. One thing that has helped me is lets say I eventually want to work on a peice that is large... lets say 300 dpi for printing.... I will start out with a small peice around lets say 300pix x 500 pix.. and block it in.. then get a little detail.. then I will resize to 600x1000 and start adding details.. that way I dont have to use large brushes... and it never gets sluggish. Then once I get that where I want it and need to add even more detail.. I will then double it again and continue to go in and add more little details..

catch my drift?

Hopefully someone has some incite on how optimize... anyhow good luck

-mike

[Lionel]

The important thing to do it vary the feature size with your brush size. The bigger your brush the bigger your feature size should be (after all if you are working with high resolution the bristles of your brushes should all so be larger so haveing a larger feature size does make sense). This thread says it all a lot better than I ever could.

Check this thread out (http://forums.sijun.com/viewtopic.php?t=30380)

[Jin]

In addition to working small, then larger, then larger adding levels of detail with each resizing,

and...

moving the Brush Controls palette Size section's Feature slider to the right to decrease bristle density,

there are other things you can to do keep Painter running smoothly and minimize sluggishness:

1. In Edit > Preferences > General, reduce the Auto Save Scripts for [ ] days number from the maximum of 10 days to a lower number as it takes memory to save scripts.

2. In Edit > Preferences > Undo, reduce the Undo number from the maximum of 32 to a lower number as it takes memory to save for Undo-ing.

3. Every hour or two, shut down Painter and in the Painter 7 > Brushes folder, delete the file named "Pre-built Brush File". This file is used to store brush information and speed up brush loading. When it becomes too large, and it can very quickly depending on which brush variant's you've been using and for how long, it can slow down Painter and cause other negative behavior. When Painter is launched again, the file is regenerated and it does no harm to delete it. Make a habit of checking the size of this file each time you close Painter and delete it if it's become large. You'll know what is too large fairly soon.

4. If you have any recorded Scripts that you want to save, use the Script Mover to create a new Scripts library, then move the Scripts you want to save into the new Scripts library. After closing Painter, go to the main Painter 7 folder and delete the Painter.ssd file (default Painter Scripts file). It will be regenerated the next time Painter is opened and if you want to use your saved custom Scripts Library, you can load it.

5. Close down other programs while working in Painter.

6. Regularly: clear out browser cache and temp files, and do system maintenance.

[Tedsuo]

Thanks a lot guys. I've been chilling away from my computer for the past couple of weeks, but now that I'm back I'll definitely start putting your tips into action. Muchas gracias.