Will there ever be a bigger brush?

[JeebusQuade]

Why is there a 500 pixel limit on brush size?  Sometimes I have to switch to Photoshop to use the brush there since its brushes go up into the thousands of pixels.  500 pixels is pretty limiting, and if there is any hack so that I can have a bigger brush, I'd love to know about it.

[skullbonz]

I always wondered about that too. I suspect it has something to do with them being free brush files and you would have to purchase the full set from the authors to get the bigger sizes. 

[Rick Brewster]

Really? What kind of stuff are you doing where 500px is limiting?

 

There's no real technical limitation here, other than some memory usage. 500 just seemed like a reasonable upper bound. It's as easy for me to change as hitting backspace a few times and typing in a new number.

[skullbonz]

I assumed he or she was talking about the brush size in the custom mini brushes, didn't dawn on me that they said pixels,lol. I would have to agree with Rick on that point. 

[JeebusQuade]

Really? What kind of stuff are you doing where 500px is limiting?

 

There's no real technical limitation here, other than some memory usage. 500 just seemed like a reasonable upper bound. It's as easy for me to change as hitting backspace a few times and typing in a new number.

 

It's that easy?  I know this is a lot to ask, but do you think you could compile a 4.0.5 build where the max brush size is something like 5000?  And to answer your question, I make a ton of 4K wallpapers.  I like to use the brush on 0% hardness to make big, sweeping adjustments, mostly.  Also, I have 16 gigs of RAM.

Edited December 29, 2014 by JeebusQuade

[Rick Brewster]

It would have to wait until a 4.0.6 release

[JeebusQuade]

It would have to wait until a 4.0.6 release

 

Fine with me.  If this actually gets in, I'd be so happy.

[SAND33P]

Id like to be able to, but im a pretty rare case with gigantic canvas sizes (12k, for no useful reason other than grrr pixels grrr)

Edited December 31, 2014 by SAND33P

[Rick Brewster]

The next update (4.0.6) will do two things:

 

1) Increase the max brush size from 500 to 2000

2) Reduce the memory usage of the brush stamp bitmap by 75% by switching from Pbgra32 to Alpha8. A brush stamp bitmap of 2000 with hardness of 0 requires a 3333 x 3333 pixel bitmap. In 4.0.5 this would've used ~44MB of memory, while 4.0.6 will use ~11MB for it. 

 

Because of memory and performance, I'm not increasing the max brush size to 5000. Even on my Dual Xeon E5-2687W (16 cores @ 3.1GHz) with 64GB of RAM, performance was very, very bad.

 

Edit: Oh, and a 5000px brush size would've used ~277MB in 4.0.5, or ~69MB in 4.0.6. It's too easy to crash when you need to allocate something that big.