I now consider Height maps to be a big downgrade

i would say 6 by far has better textures and texture handling capabilities. there is almost something blurry like a gaussian blur applied to the entire canvas in 7. even if you open 1 of the same picture in 6 and 7 you can see a blur effect on the details in 7 vs 6. the blur prevents seeing pixels but comes at the cost of not being able to get sharp details. and in these example images 7 clearly has detail missing around the strokes and looks more blurry. it isnt how strokes work in traditional art and causes it to feel digital.

the only thing that concerns me is that rebelle 6 had a strange issue where you would make a brush work exactly how you want it and even if dpi was off it would only work in certain resolutions as intended. in all others it would be blurry. this goes for the canvas textures effecting the strokes too and if you kept your eyes open while you painted you could see a small blur being applied in cases where the brush was not compatible with the canvas resolution. i wouldnt want that issue again. but i do want the crisp textures and ability to have sharp 1 pixel detail.

id rather just have 6's texture capabilities than a height map toggle per brush. the heightmap is clearly not working as intended so it needs redone. we need a feeling of weight to our brush strokes. not fake blur that isnt possible in real life painting. 

cheriekitten, I  noticed the blur effect in textures in Reb7. It bugs me so much. I don't have an idea either it's a nanopixel problem or textures are red wrong by the program  itself. 

Everything is blurry, there is no sharpness or clarity like it was in Reb6. I agree height maps don't work as planned. IN addition if you look closely at the textures' surfaces in Reb 7- you can see that peaks and valleys are all of the same "height", textures lost their definition. 

I can only agree with your last paragraph.  That's what I want as well.

I don't even wanna try out new 7 versions anymore because to fix those issues I described programmers need to completely rewrite their codes and they probably won't bother with that.

Maybe it's a good idea to return in one year and to check if those bugs are fixed, if no - we'll, then it's the direction they choosed then, it's not bugs , it's features.

Majority of people  would still use Rebelle 7  even when it loses to Reb6 big time. 

Dreamkeeper, toggle button is not enough. 

There are lots of things must be redone/being reprogrammed in R7. 

Of course, it's just a suggestion, the decision to make is by developers themselves. 

Important update:

I tested brushes with identical settings. One was imported from Rebelle 6 and other was created from the scratch in Rebelle 7. Their settings are identical, I repeat myself. 

Having identical settings they have DRASTCIALLY different results including texture influence. I have no idea how a brush can affect texture that way.

Brush from reb 7 created there from scratch had much more texture in it compared  to imported brush (from Rebelle 6)  and actually behave the way I wanted it to, having a rich texture and so on. 

A brush imported from rebelle 6  behaved ok with Height maps being OFF and behaved wrong  when Height maps were ON.  (A bland/flat effect, brush had no texture in it)

My suggestion:

Don't imported brushes from reb6, instead create your own in rebelle 7 using imported brush shapes (png images) and imported textures. Don't import brushes directly from reb 6. 

They will behave wrongly with Height maps ON. I'd be glad if someone else test this just to make sure I'm right. 

Roksana thank you for this update. I think I am one of the few users still working with Rebelle 6 having  downloaded Rebelle 7 but not yet installed it because of all the apparent issues.

You have certainly saved users like me considerable frustration….I had a feeling importing v6 custom brushes to v7 might present problems so now there is a path out thanks to your investigation. Start from scratch and create custom brushes from within the v7 brush engine. Good to know. Many thanks.

Is anyone following this topic experiencing good results that meet expectations with custom brushes transferred from v6 to v7? It would help us all out to know. I’m using an M1 Mac and a Wacom Intuos Pro. Thanks for your persistence Roksana.

i have noticed something while watching this tutorial video posted a day ago on rebelle's youtube channel

https://youtu.be/xJZgH2Gzvpw?si=nexIAKbs7U43gFI1&t=658 

timestamped ^

im wondering if that blur we are seeing on the edges of the texture strokes has been put there to leave room for rebelle 7's brush creator's new texture panel, specifically the dual brush and background texture 1 and 2. those texture's may only apply to the blurred area of a regular stroke.

learning what these new texture panels even do has been very difficult. its tough to get it to do almost anything honestly.

dual brush seems to be more responsive than background textures for me. so top example stroke is with dual brush , those sticks are specifically on the outside of the brush stroke. there is no option to change that. it lines up with the smooth areas on rebelle's heightmap strokes in the example images in this forum post.

turn that off and now background texture 1 set to a Bouguereau painting

by rubbing the canvas it revealed the background texture to be the image i set of this Bouguereau painting

then background texture 2 is set as some speckled pattern and by rubbing the canvas this appears along with the Bouguereau painting but with a much worse result.

so dual brush only works with shapes and those shapes are stuck to the edges of our brush strokes where with heightmaps on i would put a blurred edge. 

background texture 1 and 2 are literally enabling the image on the canvas sort of as a stencil but are only visible and able to be painted by that 1 brush it's set to. 

i would still rather have 6's textures, 7 is still blurry but now i think i see why they blurred out those edges. but attaching small shapes to the smooth edges of a stroke doest make sense as a " dual brush " if anything is a square png it also prints the square on those edges. which is worthless. you can see the square boxes being printed with dual brush on. and its all still blurry. 

@RoksanaDiamond: "Dreamkeeper, toggle button is not enough. "

I didn't say it's enough. But after all fixes and finetuning by EM are done, there will still be differences between Heightmap on and off. And there will be brushes that work better with HM off and others with HM on. That's where a per preset toggle would come in handy, is all that I'm saying.

> "Don't imported brushes from reb6, instead create your own in rebelle 7 ..."

You can import the brushes of course, just don't expect them to behave the same way in R7 as they did in R6. There are some adjustments necessary - that's what I was getting at in my earlier post. In fact I tested just that: took a R6 brush, imported in R7, then took a R7 brush and set it up exactly like the imported one --> both behave the same within R7.

If you try that, don't miss the curves for paint+mix and paint+blend - if no changes were made to those, they'll be switched to the new defaults in R7 on import (which imho should be changed). Also, many R7 brushes use background textures that then need to be disabled for a true comparison.

Update: I returned Reb7 to basic settings and don't experience blocky "patchy" brushes anymore, including brushes imported from Reb6, no idea what was the problem  behind this lag\bug. 

Also, seems it was "smudge on paper bumps" function which removed all the texture from examples (with flowers) on the right for me. But it worked OK when height maps were OFF

So I guess I have to turn OFF all the smudge to experience a textury effect with height maps, it's a bit unintuitive. There should be still some texture presented even when we turn ON "smudge on paper bumps".

Maybe Rebelle 7 had some previous versions conflicting, because rn - no patchy brushwork anymore (after return to basic settings). Everything is very flowy!