Hi there. I'm trying out your program, and while I love the idea, it's finally getting to the point where I want to throw in the towel. This program is, bar none, the most computationally expensive program I've ever used, and I use high-end 3D software in my work. I literally spent the last hour just adding two symbols to my mandala (the rest of the time it was crawling too slowly to even update the position of the cursor), and then it wouldn't even save because it was out of memory. Incredibly frustrating.

I installed the demo on my boyfriend's computer - his is brand-new with four gigs of RAM - and same deal. It clocks up to 800,000K in memory usage. It's painfully slow. Even small 600px mandalas are too cumbersome to work with.

I really really want to use your program. It's a great idea, and when it's only handling 4-5 _layer_s it's very intuitive and fun. More _layer_s than that or larger than 600px and it bogs down terribly.

It works on my 1.5 gig ram tablet laptop really well. It is too bad you are having so much trouble because it is an incredible program. Maybe you need to defrag. Its a thought. Good luck to you.
Dot

Hmm, it's interesting... Do you mean Mandala Painter version 3? 600 pixel mandalas should work very fast even on slow computers. (Mandala Painter 1 has a limitation that causes to repaint all the image even on little modification this slows down in high resolutions.)

Please note that Mandala Painter works in a different way than other programs. Anything you paint, modify, do the program has to calculate all the rotations. This is why it slower eg. than Photoshop. The workflow totally differs.

Did you modified the undo settings?

Still now nobody told me the same as you...

Kind regards
Zoltan Komaromy

Yes, I'm using 3.

What does this mean?:

"Please note that Mandala Painter works in a different way than other programs. Anything you paint, modify, do the program has to calculate all the rotations. This is why it slower eg. than Photoshop. The workflow totally differs."

So if the workflow is different, is there an "optimized" way to use the program? For example, perhaps it would be less computationally expensive to merge _layer_s once you won't be moving them anymore, change colors before divisions, etc. This information would be very very useful to me so I could enjoy your program.

Thank you.

Edit: I can't export to Photoshop, and I get an "invalid class" error when I try, even when I have enough memory.

And why is there no documentation for Custom Divisions in the help doc? If this is the most powerful tool in the program, it would be really nice to know about how it works!

There are several ways to optimize the workflow!
( Eg. Main Menu / View / Fast updates )

For example, perhaps it would be less computationally expensive to merge __layer__s once you won't be moving them anymore

This is what Keep rendered does! Or the Flatten Mandala command.

Please always remember that the program has to calculate all of the divisions at every paint! It's deeply optimized for speed.

Edit: I can't export to Photoshop, and I get an "invalid class" error when I try, even when I have enough memory.

What is your Photoshop version? Unfortunatelly Mandala Painter 3 works only with Photoshop CS,CS2,CS3 versions.

And why is there no documentation for Custom Divisions in the help doc? If this is the most powerful tool in the program, it would be really nice to know about how it works!

Custom division help is there:
http://www.mandalapainter.com/help3/Divisions/Working%20with%20Divisions.html

Soon I'll create video tutorials also.

Kind regards
Zoltan

Thanks for the reply. I understand that the pipeline and the programming is different from Photoshop, but I have no idea what "Please always remember that the program has to calculate all of the divisions at every paint" means in any real way. Describe it like you would to a three-year-old, because I'm not that bright.

So, correct me if I'm wrong, but the following are ways to speed up the program:

->Main Menu / View / Fast updates
->Flatten the Mandala when you're not using the _layer_s.
->Keep Rendered, which will discard the division information on the _layer_'s symbols.
-> Other?

Unfortunately I still can't get exporting to Photoshop to work. I'm using CS2. For now I'm exporting with PNGs and compiling them into Photoshop manually, and it's a little slower but working out all right. *shrug*

Thank you for the _link_ to the division documentation. That helps.

Despite my grievances with the program, I'll say this to anyone reading and thinking about buying it: Do it. It's a very powerful little program, and there's nothing better out there on the market right now. I seem to be an anomaly in terms of how much trouble I'm having.