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...!

So, a few months on, I've checked out AD to see if any of the issues listed above have been addressed over recent updates. Cursors - as noted above in my post from March 11, 2018(!), a basic overhaul of the brush cursor function please so it is usable for freehand painting. On the whole, it looks like for most brushes we've at least lost the intrusive brush outline, but success seems random and occasionally the cursor flips back to a standard windows arrow. There doesn't seem to have been any real work at all on this, which seems disappointing. By now, I would think we would be moving toward a standard PS/CSP dialogue for cursor control, as suggested above. Brush Library - changing variables on the selected brush (i.e. size) still means the blue brush selection box is turned off, so you have no idea which brush is currently selected. This feels like basic stuff. Brush Size Dialogue - still very crude. You can just about change size via the slider, but using a keyboard shortcut throws in weird variables rather than standard increments by 5 or 10 or whatever. The package is also in dire need of a PS/CSP brush size shortcut window, with preset sizes you can quickly select. All very odd - certainly the big 1.7 update brought some key improvements, but I'm still a bit baffled/frustrated why some of the key bits someone like me would look for are so unloved. We have this big, gorgeous brush engine but I still can't drive it!

Bitmaps along paths seem to be working perfectly: fantastic. Can't wait to dig in further.

After finally getting some time to investigate, I'd say sort of: virtually all the pixel brushes now have a round brush outline, rather than the image-obscuring texture outline, so there has been some progress. Not all, though: 'Airbrush 8' in the 'Sprays and Splatters' set still carries the texture outline, and I think I spotted one more plodding through the brushes. The option though to switch the outline off completely only display a cursor is not in place, and we have a long way to go before Affinity could match the options of CSP, as pictured up the thread. The problem of the brush highlight in the Brushes menu being switched off if you change a brush parameter is still an issue. It's incredibly difficult to remember which brush is currently in play, and this is something of a deal-breaker too. Overall, I'm glad to see something is happening around the brush issue, but we're still a long way off it achieving its potential.

In response to EB3's comments, I am by now fairly confident that the brush outline issue is being attended to - the discussion moved over to here... ...which was originally in the context of the current problem 1.6.5.123 AD suffers when moving nodes around: this was solved in more recent betas. As you can probably tell from the tone of my posts above, my real frustration was really the lack of response from the Affinity team, but as you can see in the quoted thread Mark Ingram did pick this up. It's a strange thing: ultimately I've just decided to be patient with Affinity and see what happens. My completely non-empiric hunch is that the suite originally never really had the ambition of being a 'natural media' product, but obviously a few of us - not least Paolo Limoncelli and his amazing brushes - have seen this potential, with AD in particular offering something not seen since the likes of the [Microsoft's] death of Creature House's Expression and even the obscure (but much-loved by me) programme called Satori from Spaceward. However, all this I doubt has ever really been seriously on Affinity's roadmap, the primary aim I guess to make a straightforward, stable competitor to Adobe and move - by all accounts pretty successfully - into the iPad space. So, at the moment, I wander by every few weeks to check on the betas and see if there has been any movement. My two main wishes are effectively a mirror of the cursor options CSP has (as detailed far above) and the ability to add raster brushes to paths in AP as you can do in PS: obviously this latter feature is 'built in' to the brush options in AP (presumably because it uses the same pop-up as AD) but simply doesn't work. It's an odd oversight. In the meantime, I use CSP for pretty much everything - the brush engine isn't (to me) as good as Affinity's and it's vector functionality is as clunky as hell, but I find it stable and of course DAUB brushes are available there too. I would wonder if at some point the CSP team (who I assume are rather larger than Affinity's) might spot the potential of the vector space and radically improve this side of the interface, remembering how ghastly the earlier Manga Studio versions were for painting and now they seem to have really pushed that to make CSP a direct competitor to PS in the presumably lucrative concept art arena. Anyway, I live in eternal hope: frankly Affinity reminds me of my Satori days (i.e. a decidedly non-corporate developer pushing some pretty nifty technology) and I'm sure at some point they will address the needs of artists who see both AP/AD as potentially incredible tools.

Aha! I knew there was a setting eluding me - you've nailed it Sean. Really loving 1.7... Peter

1.7. feels like a real shift forward - seemingly much slicker feedback on node editing, on top of the eradication of flicker - but rendering seems noticeably stepped when vector layers are rasterised, the image at the bottom 1.7.0.188 vs. 1.6.5.123 on the top. Doc is at 300dpi for both, identical source file. Brush engine tweaks a game changer, however! Fantastic.

Does anybody know if this behaviour is also on the Mac version?

Yes, I work closely with a team of devs and I'm pretty acquainted with the pressures and timescales of software development. That said, I do find the Affinity team's position on this flaw really pretty odd, with a blanket refusal it seems to even comment or give projection I just don't think I've encountered in another small developer. It is pretty dismissive, and if it wasn't for the vector potential of Design (and the absence of good vector packages on Windows) I honestly don't think I would be pursuing any of this. As it is, the lack of communication from Affinity betrays a strange arrogance. Their obsession with their iPad presence really starts to grate when a fundamental usability issue continues to roll on, unaddressed, for month after month. I cannot confidently recommend Affinity to my studio team when this is the customer experience, a team happy on their Macs and their Adobe product. Software is not just the platform, it is the totality: it is the understanding you are cared for. What we are all suggesting will help open Affinity up to an even broader market, but for some perverse reason they seem pretty bent on breeding resentment, in at least one of their customers: not the greatest business model in the wafer-thin opportunity outside of the Adobe space.

Mmm - heartily aware of that, but really looking for a response from Affinity as to if this feature is on the horizon and in the various conversations that have drifted around this, any word from Affinity has been absent since last summer. Some sense of timescale (this month/season/year etc) would be helpful: both versions of Affinity lie unused by me, because of this particular feature absence.

Not a stability issue, but is there any hope that Designer (and indeed Photo) will ever address the suggestions most broadly summarised in https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/52572-preferences-add option-to-removehide-brush-outline/&tab=comments#comment-320537? Sean P posted back in July that this was on the roadmap, but we're now well over a year later for a game-changer for us digital painting folks. Every so often I stop by the beta in hope, but....