Maestrorobertus

Hey Substance is on totally different level, its easy there. But you need an Adobe subscription. There is actually a simple trick to do that with FX. You need to layer to fx, to do that you need to groups and place your shapes below. The shapes need to have the default normal map color. Then you need a bevel effect on both groups with 45° 45° light and then second with -45° the first will have green vs pink and then second blue vs. white. and both FX groups need to use overlay. I did this for adding Text to a normal map. It did work perfect. Not so easy to use, but if the developers would be not so lazy, they could easily add that to the FX or Styles..

There is actually a simple trick to do that with FX. You need to layer to fx, to do that you need to groups and place your shapes below. The shapes need to have the default normal map color. Then you need a bevel effect on both groups with 45° 45° light and then second with -45° the first will have green vs pink and then second blue vs. white. and both FX groups need to use overlay. I did this for adding Text to a normal map. It did work perfect. Not so easy to use, but if the developers would be not so lazy, they could easily add that to the FX or Styles..

Funny you mentioned Quixel. I do all my megascan mixes in AP, because its like 100 times faster the Mixer. And Mixer is really limited. Output opacity maps still not working. Yeah I would prefer a file format, where all channels are linked into one image, instead putting things into extra channels would be quiet work intensive. Indeed I have a setup in BM Fusion where I can do that. Downpoint of all tools is that they can't deal with normals well. For example you overlay an normal map with another and rotate it. That goes wrong, because the normals always would point in different direction. There are tools that can convert such rotation, but of course ideal would be a shape or a high map. And tools et that easily convert your normal into a high map, rotate it, convert it back. And there are tools that do that, just not in Affinity tools yet. Sadly Affinity ignores game designer a lot. Stil not seen any live effect that can do affine displace the simple most needed for doing tillable textures. I keep requesting that since Version 1.0..

thanks!

To sum it up, my top problems with AP are these 2 and I just wonder if someone has a solution. 1. The top problem I have is, that I quiet of loose during work the selection of a layer. So I may try to work on, but nothing happens, eg. no layer selected to draw or work on. While this is not bad when creating new shapes, it is a big problem during painting. Anyone got a solution here? Is there log to layer feature somewhere? Or better a feature that prevent from having nothing selected... 2. I simple hate that certain shortcuts do cycle to the next tool. I mean if I hit b, I want a brush and not first look to the icon in the toolbar to see if its moved on to next tool or not. I hit m double like 20 times a day and simple can't stand if suddenly I get a circle. Any checkbox to turn that off? There are other things, but I nearly always found a work around or trick, hope you got one for me here too... 🙂

Thanks, not the easiest workflow. I think a few things should be made possible in the future: 1. Turn of the grey border, so you can see how seamless the pattern is during painting. (instead of borders the user can easily add helping lines) 2. Paint over the borders, the paint tools should work when painting over the border line, so the overlaying brush paints on the mirrored size. Otherwise its quite impossible to generate seamless patterns. 3. Crop to pattern size. Would be useful to save the pattern if there would be an easy option to automatically crop the image to the pattern size. So this is manual quite tricky.

How to use a image/photo/vector shape as source for a pattern layer ?

There are two things difficult with textures. first, the are multi channel, like normal. Roughness. Etc. So you have to work on opacity masks only, or you have to redo the other maps later. In my opinion, this needs multi channel support, so you can also output the channels all at once. I do a lot Quixel work in AP, and use the load stack. One problem have er when dropping images in the workspace is, they don’t align. Second, the most important task on textures is making it tile able. Unfortunately AP has no none destructive workflow here. So transform effect need to be done as no filter, or we need a paint effect that projects on the opposite side when near border.

I couldn't figure out how Dropbox on the iPad can collaborate with Affinity Photo on iOS. I had hopes it works like with iCloud. Now, as all our projects get shared via Dropbox, it would be awesome to have this working in the future. Hope it will be possible.

The Affine filter is essential for my work. Please make it a live filter, it makes me crazy to re-type the values in an in again. Also the filter need to be improved: 1. reacted to the current workspace (not to the layer selected, if the layer is bigger) 2. transform by pixel, not percentage. thanks

Every time I use the Mesh Warp Tool it happens that suddenly one edge of the rectangle vanish and then AP crashes with no option to save. This is really annoying, please fix it !

well dragging into onto a layer does only work, if its mask. Meanwhile I got it to work, seem to be an issue with the color proof of the file. (32bit). Looks promising, will keep testing it so. Anyhow, why isn't that command directly under the layer popup menu? It was one of the hardest thing coming from Photoshop.

Did some tests on 'Rasterize to Mask' command and have to say, that stinks! Such a bad translation of a Alpha mask. Its nothing more then taking the black 100% color and make a stencil out of it. So every grey is ignored and the mask leaves a clear border on the edges. I can't understand why you can paint with black and white in a mask, but that stupid mask is not considered like a black white image, like in other painting software. It looks like Affinity created a real problem for users here. So the work around is like before: select a color in the channel with the Select Sample Color and great a mask manual. Bad job guys..

Thanks. Didn’t seen 1. Before. Yes about 2 that is a needed feature. Sometimes I need to mask things inside and things outside. Using the same shape here is really helpful, especially if changes keep coming. That and instanced layers.

I often get masks as black/white images from rendering or other tools. Is there a quick way to turn them into masks? Or use them as mask... And another one: How can I invert a shape mask effect

The flip horizontal feature will use the middle of the selected layers. But I need very often to mirror layers from one side of the image to the exact other side. I haven’t found a way doing that else the with a little trick. I select my layers, do a copy. Then flip the whole image. Paste and then flip the image back. Doesn’t work with text, but for shapes its fine. So anyone knows a better trick?

Typo: Feather

You only get that if you turn the feature feature on.. by default its 0 px.

If you want to convert a shape/spline/etc. to pixels, you can do that in the context menu. If you have more then one shape layer selected, you can't. You have to go through each layer right click and choose pixelate. Well you can of course flatten the whole document etc. but maybe you just want to work on an area where created 10 little cycles. I haven't found a work around here, but this should really improved. Also merging layers should automatically convert shapes and images. Its just so time consuming to see it fail again and again.. and then go through all layers finding the bad guy.

If you do a selection and copy paste it you get a new pixel layer. Thats what should happen. If you then move the new selected by pressing V you see things moving, BUT !!! the developers added a trap here. Because you just move the selection and as there is always some smoothing you will see a tin frame in there area where you pasted. So, thats not a good workflow at all. Either drop the selection first, and please make that automatic, or you will always have to think: ctrl+d before pressing v...

I got totally confused about what happens to when I click the short cut of a tool twice. Normally nothing should happen. But AP just cycles through tools. Well there is no checkbox for turning that off, so I removed all shortcuts till I had only one key for my tool, but then the next thing happen. AP now jumps between selected and last used tool. Well, some people might like that, if you focus on screen and not on the buttons on the side, or even like me like to hide them with just shortcut usage you constantly run into problems. Is there a way to turn it off? If not please add that, it drives me nuts.

I read a lot and I think the new 1.7 is not going anywhere close to what many users express here. Just a list of things people want: 1. Convert Black/White to mask. In PS its easy, take any black white image and use it as mask. Thats what an alpha channel looks like anyway. Not so in AFP. This should be a one click action. 2. Merge Layers. In AFP you need to convert layers first to pixel than merge.. that is annoying. We need an option to make that work in one step. 3. Transform areas of the image. It cost so much time that, each time you want to transform a selection you need to copy it first to another layer, then fiddle around with transparency and get the transform to the area it should work. Please make things easier. 4. Brush Scale. Brackets, may be the keys for US users, but people have different keyboards in other countries. Each time I need to change that to , . for 20 tools. Thats annoying. Also we need a better workflow to adjust the brush size on Windows. This simple is essential! 5. Remember filter settings. Each time I use a filter again, I have to input the values against.. balls... thats so super annoying. You ain't know how many times I do that per day. And where are the actions still missing to build own actions? 6. File close.. each time I close an image, AFP ask me to save it.. no mater what I do it will be still open and I need to close it again. These are the most annoying things that need care. I could write a longer list, but I done it quite some times here... so please give us things we really need, not another app for iOS, Android.. and other fancy unprofessional stuff. ;-)

Absolute. I would suggest that the iOS interface could be available for the Desktop version too. So you can really benefit from the Touch Screen options. Not sure if the Developers actually had that in mind at all.

Ok, thanks there it is. It was a bit strange to first need to set the percentage to make it work. Was used to presets that do that all automatic, like in sketch tools.

The only feature I found that enables the pen pressure is the little button in the tool menu. But it only controls the brush size. Is there more? Or more to come? It looks currently really poor.