Smudge Tool Not Working Properly

[sirpolygoon]

When I try to smudge a mask, either nothing appears to happen, or very little smudging occurs until I do another stroke somewhere else, and boom, the original site shows much more of a smudge than shown prior. It's like a delayed refresh. Does that make sense?

I'd love to use smudge but atm it's pretty useless to me.

Thanks!

[sleekdigital]

I don't know if this is the same issue, but I was also having problems with the smudge tool.  What I discovered is that it behaves erratically if you have very low poly mesh.  Seems like it won't smudge pixels near the center of a large polygon.  I subdivided my mesh a few times and now it seems to work normally.

[justaviking]

I had horrible results when I first tried the smudge tool (several versions ago), but after getting a new graphics card, it works fine.  That was my first personal experience with the strange behavior that can be caused in Painter by a substandard GPU.  Drivers matter, too, and sadly right now we can't automatically say to update to the latest Nvidia drivers since they have issues.

But if everything else is working fine, Sleek's theory sounds like a good one.

[sleekdigital]

An easy way to illustrate the issue ... just import a large single quad to paint on, and try to use the smudge tool on it.  I'm using an Nvidia gtx 980 Ti, using almost the latest drivers.  I did not yet install the ones that just released a day or so ago.

[justaviking]

I'm using an Nvidia gtx 980 Ti, using almost the latest drivers.  I did not yet install the ones that just released a day or so ago.

Allegorithmic currently recommends Nvidia 388.71 drivers.

Normally newer is better, but not always.
More info here:  https://forum.allegorithmic.com/index.php/topic,22711.0.html


Based on your description, I wonder if you've discovered an "opportunity for improvement."  It will be interesting to see if Allegorithmic has a comment to add.

[sirpolygoon]

I don't know if this is the same issue, but I was also having problems with the smudge tool.  What I discovered is that it behaves erratically if you have very low poly mesh.  Seems like it won't smudge pixels near the center of a large polygon.  I subdivided my mesh a few times and now it seems to work normally.

That makes sense. Strange quirk for a tool to have in software where one of its primary uses is to texture low-poly models. Nonetheless, I get it. Rather like trying to polypaint in Zbrush on a low-poly model.

[sirpolygoon]

I had horrible results when I first tried the smudge tool (several versions ago), but after getting a new graphics card, it works fine.  That was my first personal experience with the strange behavior that can be caused in Painter by a substandard GPU.  Drivers matter, too, and sadly right now we can't automatically say to update to the latest Nvidia drivers since they have issues.

But if everything else is working fine, Sleek's theory sounds like a good one.

Yeah, I'm running a GTX 1080. I agree that Sleek's theory sounds correct. I hope Allegorithmic can get that sorted one day.