falled in love with your software, hope you could help out with a problem+ a couple of questions about future versions.

Hi i'm trying out expresii (windows store version) and i love it, and surely i will buy it asap.
in those 4 days i meet a problem (and a related one)

i'm on a cintiq 27 qhd+another 27'' monitor, in extended desktop.
if there's only the cintiq on or only the monitor expresii work like a charm.
if the 2 monitors are on, expresii close.no errors no info, simply crash, and the correlate is that i loose configuration, ( i know that cause i've to reflag lazy nezumi compatibility and so on).
When i try to swap layers, sometimes won't work, ive to retry a couple of times, this problem is absent if with mous on monitor, with the cintiq off.
i hope there's a solution for those problems.

then a couple of question, i read that you are working on the pencil part for expresii, there's hope that would be as accurate as the watercolour is, no software i know are even near to real graphite pencil.
you would add paper or the option to load scan of paper on expresii in the near future?

thanks in advance for your attention.

Thanks for your feedback!
hm... that's interesting. I don't own a cintiq, but I do own an XPPen pen display. I have no problem using the FHD pen display together with another monitor, which is 4k, in extended desktop mode.  I'm on APU Ryzen 2400G, Windows 10. The 2400G is not a very beefy APU, but is at least a modern CPU/GPU combo.

If it's layer swapping that goes wrong, it sounds like it's a problem related to graphics card. What GPU do you have? Maybe their driver is not very good at handling large desktop & OpenGL apps. On Windows 10?

Not actively working on pencil right now. I think there're pretty good simulation of pencil on other apps, if you're okay with them being raster-based.

We already have custom paper texture support, but you need to switch to Advanced User mode: https://expresii.forumotion.net/t158-can-we-make-our-own-paper

Hi thanks for your reply.
specs of my machine are
OS: Windows 10 Pro (10.0)
i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz
Mem 16gb
Radeon Fury X
Eizo as fs2735 as monitor
cintiq 27qhd
the machine is clean and dedicated only to graphic task so there's only few programs (clip lazy nezumi, adobe suite) +comodo antivirus, (i tried altready with comodo disabled behave same result), no problem with other application.
there's a way to start expresii in a way that could create a "dump"? so i could send you a log?

raster simulation of pencil have all the usual quirks, the way they "build up", fidelity and tilting even the best brushes (eg daub ) i hope you will come out with something similar to the gorgeous watecolor engine.

i missed the topic for paper thanks.

I see your graphics card is from 2015, which is a little bit old. I'd suggest see if you can upgrade your GPU driver first. I'd also try to get a system with an AMD card that is a little bit old, and test with dual display.

I do have a crash report system built in Expresii, that looks sth like this:


User is supposed to be able to send me an error report. But too bad if Expresii just crashed and didn't show any option for error report for you.

nope no crash report.
drivers are up to date.
as new i cannot   put an image of  how is the screen is when it crash.

i "sidewalked" the drivers to 20.5.1 from 20.4.2 (latest whql) same result if could be of use, it crash when i try to pass from the ui from one tab to another (eg to layer from brushes)
ui flash then expresii stop working, I'm always forced to kill the process.
i dumped from the process tree (but the dmp file is 1.50 gigs..) when i could i give alook at the windows logs if there's something.

The description of how it crashed (clicking the UI, switching between bursh, layers tabs) is informative. Such situation is completely new to me. I also wonder if it's related to Wacom. If you have another monitor, maybe you can try connect two monitors instead of one monitor + one cintiq. If getting rid of the cintiq fixes the issue, then it seems it's something to do with Wacom.

I have an older AMD card, but I still need to find a way to connect the 2nd monitor via DVI or VGA.

Update: and on the Ryzen 2400G machine, I am able to connect 1 FHD monitor, 1 4k monitor, and 1 XP-Pen FHD pen display, working fine with Expresii.

to me could be wacom related. after reading your reply, i've done some experiment, and i found a workaround that make me think there's something wrong with wacom and expresii.

The workaround.
!when the monito and the wacom are on.!
Expresii must load on the monitor never on the cintiq, i've to place some stroke with the mouse, and wait for c.a 20 sec switch between the various tab, 8 time out of 10 the ui sidbar flash for a moment, then i could move the canvas on the cintiq and start painting.
after the first snap down or merge i could move the sidebar on the cintiq and continue working without problems.

this thing is reproducible always (i tested for 15 times on 64bit version and 10 times with 32bit version).


wacom drivers 6.3.39-1 (latest).
change nothing if i use windows ink or not. (disabled from wacom control panel too to be sure).
tested if could be a problem of the display toggle or force proprtion of wacom change nothing.

Hope this would be an help
if you want i could make a video via smartphone of what happen but you have to tell me where i could upload it to you.

Thanks for the tests and more information. Yes, a video can help avoid any misinterpretation. If you have a youtube account, could you please upload it to youtube? You can set the video to "unlisted" in you don't want it to be public. Thanks!
I'll try to borrow a cintiq to test.

Sorry for my self taught english..

so crashing condition



and workaround



hope would be usefull..

Thanks a lot for the videos! They're very useful in seeing exactly what is going on.

I'm asking my friend to lend me a cintiq and I should get it earlier next week. Meanwhile, maybe good for me to mention that previously, I encountered an issue with Wacom's driver on AMD graphics. It's the on-screen hint/menu that appears when I touch the side buttons of an intuos pro tablet. That hint will gradually fade out, and if I make a stroke before it fades away completely, I'll get an error message coming from the AMD graphics module. I contacted Wacom and they say it's not their problem, and I also can't find any cause from my side. This is not a very common case so I didn't do anything further. Interestingly, this only happens with AMD graphics. Nvidia and intel graphics won't have such an issue. So, I wonder if there's again something that only happens with Wacom+AMD+Expresii.

Anyway, I will see if I can recreate the issue you showed me when I get the cintiq and hopefully I can find a way to fix this.

Not that wacom would ever reply something different than that.
If Amd side, hope they would dig into.. usually they support their products for a long time

thank a lot for your support.

So I got the Cintiq 13HD. Tested with a system with AMD Readeon HD 7730, dual monitors both at FHD and it was fine for both Store and Desktop versions of Expresii:



I tried to do like what you did in the video: move from one monitor to the cintiq, make a few strokes with wacom pen, and then click on the layer tab, and more, like swapping layers. Everything worked for me as expected.
Right now, I really don't have an idea of why you get that crashing.

Update: another machine with AMD APU 4200G Vega 11 also working fine:

Thanks.
After reading i decided to put up on a partition another istance of windows 10 and update it till latest iteration Windows 10, version 2004
put up wacom and radeon drivers.. nothing else. (stupid me not thinking about doing this before).
Expressii it's working. no problems. (i even topped the 400fps stable with huge brush)

So is a conflict with something else.. one suspect could be Comodo antivirus suite. (that is effective but invasive)
i've nothing else i could suspect i got only photo and paint software (adobe suite, clip rebelle and raw therapee).

Thanks for the update information. The performance of your system is great. If that anti-virus intercepts some running process, it's possibly a reason why Expresii would stop working, although I'd be surprised if Comodo would intercept something without informing the user. BTW, I myself only rely on Microsoft's own Defender without installing any more anti-virus software. So, I guess you can easily find out if it's due to Comdo by installing it?

As i've formatted the istance i use for drawing and photography, i prefer follow another way
not installing comodo for now but start with all the rest, and test after every software installation if expresii continue to work as expected.
this way i could catch what software is playing havoc with expresii
If none of the others give expresii troubles we know is comodo.

Hi
All my usual software reinstalled apart Comodo.
I report that is perfectly working, i suspect somehow there's a problem between the two.
A minor annoyance the world is full of antivirus.

And now i'm one of your happy customer.

Thank you very much for your purchase and letting me know!