Frank Jonen

Going by most user friendly and easy to read/write, cross platform, most connectivity to other application, there really isn't another choice but Python. It became the lingua-franca of inter-app communication (despite D-BUS) and in-app automation. I think Adobe might have been the only ones who run JavaScript embedded into a desktop app (outside of browsers and browser-based apps). As far as adoptability: I don't think JavaScript/ECMA has ever been accused of being user friendly.

Especially with the new 3D view and texturing enhancements this would make a lot of sense. A brush, driven by Python and/or OSL. When it is applied to a curve it follows it. When it is brushed on, it can leverage additional parameters like tilt/pressure and speed/velocity. Similar to the procedural texture layer it should have a few examples and then let the user pop out a text field to paste in (and modify) their own code and attach variables to UI controls. This could be made available for fill-layers as well.

A regular occurrence is that I have to wait for Affinity to redraw a complex layer stack every time I zoom in to place something accurately. It would be great if we could lock the entirely of the document from redrawing and re-evaluating every single filter layer. In addition to that have the option to punch a hole into that and draw out a region of interest. This way ONLY that region updates and we have less working delays. You can look at some reference implementations of that in every offline 3D rendering app, 2D / 3D compositing app. Personally I like how it works in Nuke but if we could just have a couple of rectangles stored in a file to activate when needed, it would save a lot of time in client communications and iterations.

Indeed. Like a nested document layer. Doing this via a live layer would also open up the possibility of easy versioning within a document. The output then creates the layer to be used in the layer stack. Node tree recipe files are tiny. You could easily stack a few up and send the file to your TD or supervisor for selection. I kinda like the idea. Have all your items in the layer stack and reference them from the comp = portable project file. Or only have one comp layer and reference outside files from there. Best of both worlds. Typography items could be embedded Designer files that have their output as an input in the comp even.

I don't recall who it was, but someone from the Affinity team once posted here that under the hood it's a node-based architecture that is exposed to the user as a layer stack. A Compositing Persona would be amazing and is definitely possible but I don't really have high hopes for that. At least not near-term. It would be great to have it with the 3D texture map preview and a few more generative nodes to create surface details. Maybe that could be a step towards getting nodes.

When painting on a mask we shouldn't need to manually set the colours to greyscale, masks are greyscale by definition. When clicking on a mask layer it should automatically switching to black and white colours in the tool palettes. Also it would be helpful if we could preview the selections normally with an overlay colour. Right now the mask preview doesn't work for existing layers only to create new masks. That feels like a bug.

On Designer I was able to get around it by using TIFF as an export. To replicate it in Designer, make copies of the artboard and export to JPEG directly. That's when it happens here, sometimes even in TIFF export.

It seems to be intermittent. With Designer I get it sometimes, with Photo always. In the original document I have 12 Artboards, "whole document" exports them all as one image for some reason instead of all Artboards at once.

Didn't get a notification about this, so I missed it. But uploaded it now.

😮😲 I hope you don't go full kitchen sink on this but keep it basic and focused. We have great evolving tools with Quixel Mixer, ArmorPaint and Mari. What none of these do well, not even Mari is decals. Anything artwork related excessively sucks to do in all texture painting apps. You always have to leave the app. With your approach I'm getting some hope that I can design the decals in place as vector art, keep it nimble. That way we can either just export the albedo/base with the decals and load them into Quixel to include in a WIP material or work on finished textures to paint decals into. Right now a workflow like that (that is reliable and respects OCIO) doesn't exist. Photoshop only works well up to 16-bit integer. Affinity doesn't have that problem. I can just roundtrip without sacrifice for the first time ever. And with an in-context texture preview, now that's really something. A "dumb" bump map support would be great. That way we can see light effects of the displacement without tesselation slowing us down. Maybe a toggle between bump and displacement view? Old school bump maps are almost forgotten these days, but for fast previews of displacement features they're very useful.

The integer vs float is causing so many problems in the whole suite. How about two buttons in the transform panel "make whole pixels" to set the dimensions and/or the position to integer values?

I just built the file back with much of the key assets removed. Do you have a place where I can upload it?

Here's a quick way in Photo to illustrate the problem in a very binary way. The clean looking one is NN. What you're looking at is a single pixel column selected on the artboard edge. When that pixel column is filled, it automatically blurs and bleeds into adjacent colours. Yes, feathering and anti-aliasing are off. This is not a vector shape but a pure pixel marquee. The bug is only in Photo. In Designer the setting sticks until I reboot the system. In Photo it's until I restart the app.

Error is in the JPEG exporter. I just exported to TIFF. That one still works. For now I wrote a script to batch it through ImageMagick, so it gets converted for the web automatically in that folder. Here it is in case someone else needs it: https://pastebin.com/32W6ZHBm Setting it up to a folder goes nicely through Automator.

And now it's in both apps. I just duplicated an Artboard in Designer and now that one exports erroneously while the predecessors export normally (from Designer. In Photo they're all crapping out).