Painter is a digital art and painting application, from Corel Corporation.
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ZBrush
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Pixologic in Los Angeles offers ZBrush, a digital sculpting and painting program for the 3D industry. Built within its interface, ZBrush offers tools for digital artists with an arsenal of features that have been developed with usability in mind, to create a user experience designed to feel natural while simultaneously inspiring the artist. With the ability to sculpt up to a billion polygons, ZBrush allows users to create almost limitless models.
Corel Painter does have a lot of great brushes, and they do emulate real art supplies very well. Especially the thick paint is well done. But unfortunately there are so many functional and UX bugs that overall it is just horrible to work with. When contacting customer support about it, they really seem clueless about the seriousness of the situation, and clueless about what proper UX is in general. They have tried to make it work a bit like Photoshop, which is a good move but then some things are absolutely not intuitive at all and they are definitely missing the mark horribly with so many issues. I would highly recommend using Photoshop instead, though you'll have to download them separately; it also offers a lot of great brushes nowadays and works much much smoother without all those aggravating bugs of Painter. The price of Corel Painter is just not at all worth all these horrible bugs.
Blender is still behind Zbrush when it comes to production quality. But ZBrush is a bit on the expensive side. But again, I've used it for 20 years. So the $100s of spent back then have paid off many times over by now. Just something to consider when purchasing, though.
If it wasn't quite clear yet, I'll state it again: the usability of Corel Painter is, simply put, horrid. And I am not talking about rendering, lagging, etc., it is not even all that bad there. I am talking about the weird issues like being unable to move a brush into a custom brush palette when you work on a second screen, like being unable to move the software onto the second screen in the first place unless you separate all the palettes and the windows (and if nobody tells you upfront there is no way of knowing because the manual doesn't state this at all), and then having to drag all your separate windows and palettes over one by one every time your computer wakes up again, and they won't really want to move to the other screen but only through a tiny corner of your screen, and the fact that you have to scroll through lists and lists of fonts but can't search and when you apply this font, add another piece of text the font jumps back to the default font of all the text already applied even when you haven't selected any of the text. Just to name a very small few.
It was really hard to get them to understand what I was having problems with. It was hard to get the message through that Painter has an unacceptable amount of functional and UX bugs. When I finally talked to someone who was easier to communicate with, he was very stoic about the situation, like they didn't really care about the awful amount of bugs.
Corel Painter has support to multiple OS and across all the devices. Coloring and multi layer imaging works very well. The new enhanced brush settings and the redesigned brush libraries.
Even though it's 4x as old, ZBrush is still better in my opinion. Plus, I'm just so used to it by now after 20 years. Blender will indeed become better over time and the leading industry standard soon, but for now, ZBrush is still better for me for sure. Love it!
