Does anyone know any painting soft with impasto brushes that could export depth?

gnoop

I used Corel Painter  plus Blender addon that reads riff files but now can't activate my 2017 license any more.  Too old.    And honestly it's ancient and inconvenient  as hell.  Nothing really new there for decades.

Any other soft focused on  real world brush simulation  that could export depth ?    Art rage?  Rebelle?  Anything ?

Alex_J

art rage is my favorite though i have not tested many of the alternatives. i have not exported depth before myself but looks like its possible: 
How To Add Texture Effects – Artrage

i think they have a month long free trial and its easy software to get around in so big recommendation from me

gnoop

Alex_J   Thanks .     Could you do a quick test please  it if you have it .  I am not perfectly sure but  I think I tried it decade ago and it exported  8bit  height map that  turned out having  ugly  steps when I tried  to produce normal map from it .  Not sure if it was art rage  exactly or maybe some other soft.    Or perhaps it was a trial version limitation.

Alex_J

@gnoop

from the layer panel an option to export layers. It gives a bump, reflection, and whatever sh is. I'm sure you can setup options for the quality somewhere but just zooming into the image, it looks like same as what I in art rage in terms of resolution.

gnoop

Thanks Alex_J.    I mean not the resolution but rather pixel depth .  Is this png  8 or 16 bit per grey channel  ?  

My favorite painting soft is Rebelle actually  but  it doesn't have any height map export at all  . I asked them to do it  many years ago as well as many other people too  but they never did it .    Blender 2.7 addon  allows to export perfect 16 bit floating point depth  from corel Painter riff files  but I hate Painter . It's slow, lagging , over-complicated and unnaturally  looking  brush wise.  it was better in 90th actually than today.

Alex_J

not sure exactly, but maybe you know how to read this: 
the ICC profile info shown from affinity photo after opening it. Not sure if the RGB/8 format dropdown indicates that this is RGB8 or thats just the default selection. Is there some other way to check? 
Art Rage doesnt seem to have any export options to change it, so seems like might not be an option.  Some old forum questions on art rage forums ask about it and are told its only 8 bit, however the latest question I saw was 2018

gnoop

YE

Alex_J said:

not sure exactly, but maybe you know how to read this: 
the ICC profile info shown from affinity photo after opening it. Not sure if the RGB/8 format dropdown indicates that this is RGB8 or thats just the default selection. Is there some other way to check? 
Art Rage doesnt seem to have any export options to change it, so seems like might not be an option.  Some old forum questions on art rage forums ask about it and are told its only 8 bit, however the latest question I saw was 2018

Yeah, it's probably me on that old forum  . Looks like nothing have changed since . 8 bit is not a good pixel depth for the height . Makes it hard to make anything good from it . I recall I got stepped lines across palette knife strokes  when turned it into normal map.  Tried to make sort of wall plaster layers with it.    Just hoped something may have changed since.   

it's weird non of those sophisticated art painting soft  having complex brushes way beyond what substance painter, mari  or even Zbrush  could  offer   doesn't have so obviously necessary feature.      Just tried last Rebelle . it's absolutely fantastic  but zero to use , nothing to export.