whitehead

Just to say that within V2 there is indeed the option to toggle between the brush outline and crosshair by using the Caps Lock key. As revealed in the thread linked, there is some work going on to solve the non-highlighted current brush issue, and the conversation leads to Ash Hewson's note on the Caps Lock function; I'm not sure how widely this was understood. Peter

Thank you Ash - I was not aware of the V2 caps lock toggle and this is a game changer for me; as a result, I've just spent the last four hours noodling happily with Paolo's DAUB brush sets and rediscovering what a subtle brush engine Affinity has. We can basically tick this one as solved... superb! Wants I think would be subtle enhancements: nobody I am sure wants to copycat other platforms, but CSP obviously has a pretty mature context cursor system (i.e. eraser cursor for the eraser, the option to toggle the fill cursor to crosshair and so on) but these are possibly overkill. Obviously the likes of Rebelle, Artrage and the rest have their own solutions. I'll pop a note in the existing brush options thread toward this solution. Peter

So... if brushes are finally getting some love (bearing in mind this topic first surfaced, to my knowledge, back in 2016... ...can this mean the absence of comprehensive brush cursor management will finally be addressed too? Posts date back to at least 2017 on this, and still the number one reason i do not habitually fire up Affinity. Peter

The annual check-in is a familiar ritual. For the record, I've still purchased 2.0 to keep my skin in the game: as I've often said, Affinity's aims are laudable but their refusal to attend to their illustrator base feels simply perverse. It's so sad and strange, but now as the bottom will probably drop out of the digital illustration market anyway, perhaps they've just been incredibly far-sighted all along not to care. Ho-hum!

I wish I could say I had been holding out any hope.

A problem with a 2.0 paid upgrade will be what Affinity choses to see as 'worthy' and what not for such an apparently major overhaul. For instance, will we see a solution to the brush options issue, as first posted back in 2017... ...an issue that still, even now, fatally hobbles AD/AP. What makes the 2.0 shopping list I feel will be crucial toward those who choose to drop the dime and those who will decide to forever close the Affinity door.

It's probably not the most elegant solution, but it definitely works (AD for Windows). p

Absolutely agree on every point. For me, all Affinity need do is clone CSP's brush dialogue and we would be there so everyone is happy, but even after years we are still no closer. I genuinely do not know how anyone approaches painting/sketching in AD/AP with such fundamental issues (the brush 'resize and unhighlight the brush you are using' is another corker) and it is incredibly frustrating, as is the basic silence from Affinity. This, apparently, is their modus operandi and to some extent understandable - no developer has the time to comment on every feature request/bug report - but after all these years it starts to feel a lot like arrogance. Of course, over time CSP have ramped up their own vector tools and you feel they could make serious inroads into this market if they had a mind, just as they have started to mop up on PS's space for illustration now. I can't imagine Procreate aren't looking at the vector space too. Anyway, all very interesting - I don't use an iPad and your comments have answered some questions I've had there. The most galling thing around Affinity is their focus on everything else but this, from focus on Publisher to their 600k object layers... effectively absolutely anything rather than address very legitimate feature requests going back to 2016 or so.

Are you referring to the iPad version, Renderluz? Sadly (within Windows at any rate) the accursed 'outline' is very much a permanent issue, as the (many) comments above attest, going back years and years. Just a sad joke now.

Mark, is there any timeline around solving the brush highlights issue as reported in the thread 'What Brush am I Using'... (this thread beginning in December 2016) ...and the GUI problems as reported in the thread ' preferences: add option to remove/hide brush outline'? (this thread beginning December 2017) As I see it, neither issue has been addressed at all and cumulatively all I think are ground zero hindrances to artists who would be looking to make the switch to AD and/or AP from CSP, Painter and the rest - a huge market. The 'sneak peak' of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnfxzknVK_0 is interesting and welcome, but as ever with so much of Affinity development, handling 600k object layers feels so much like an eccentric edge case in comparison to basic GUI problems that make the apps hugely unusable if you are a digital painter. 1.10 feels like a milestone release but it is crushing to try out the beta and find all of these conditions as they were five years ago. With thanks, Peter

Out of curiosity, I checked to see if even one suggestion from had been implemented. Nope! Changed brush size: brush instantly de-highlighted in library. However, we can make pixel brushes in AD on the fly. Desktop shortcut deleted for another year... 🤷‍♂️

Everything here at Tl;dr is a standard cursor suite and the ability to completely switch off the brush outline Changing brush size to not visually deselect the active brush (i.e. currently no idea which brush is active once you amend size) I genuinely feel the addition of these three elements would be a game changer for anyone who wants to use AD/AP for natural media art. Thank you Peter

Indeed the first post on this was by Paulo Limoncelli back in October 2016: if Affinity can ignore Paulo, I guess they can ignore anyone. It's really baffling 🙄

Without wishing to sound the pessimist, this 'feature' request goes back at least three years and like a number of other utterly basic artist-specific issues in AD and AP (such as Affinity remembering which brush you are using after changing the state of the brush and size increments to the nearest whole number, rather than bonkers 4.9, 9.7, 15.6 and so on) it has been ignored. I've long since given up on Affinity as a tool, and as I've described in previous posts they certainly lost business in me being able to recommend Affinity to my company's design team. Although I can conceive of people using Designer for standard vector tasks, it's beyond me how anyone can use it for digital painting given the problems with the interface. It's a shame as the brush engine is actually really nice: although it doesn't have the real world dynamics of some packages, it's in the same kind of league as CSP. The world is crying out for an all-in-one vector/bitmap solution for artists, but ironically you feel CSP is starting to move into the vector space more and more and of course their tools for drawing are incredibly mature now. Even Krita has come on pretty strongly in the same period but - for the artist - Affinity has been stuck, aside from some stability improvements and the excellent isometric grid options. However, I am absolutely certain that this, like every other post on this subject, will remain ignored. This isn't even a goad to prompt the team: it's just a statement of rather sad fact.

Definitely a must...!