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revo

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Everything posted by revo

  1. I know this was asked in 2014 and 2015 and 2019 and perhaps you are getting tired of the question but, I have to ask, since the version 1 roadmap included it, and you are at 1.9, does that mean gradient mesh is coming out very shortly? I notice the roadmap disappeared since I had it bookmarked. Does this mean there is no longer any gradient mesh plan? I recall reading that your designer had some interesting new ideas for how to implement it and that it could take a while. I believe that was 2015. For those who do not recall it here is an archived version from 2018 of a post from 2014. Mesh fill tool is literally the top item listed within illustration and design
  2. Nobody at Serif gives even half a shit about a twenty year user. I recommend boycotting the company entirely. I bought at least six versions of Drawplus and I was their largest fan until Affinity when they defecated in my mouth and told me to swallow it with a smile.
  3. The answer, for those interested, is a definitive no. Serif has abandoned any plan to include gradient mesh in Serif Affinity. I was hopeful, but, a roadmap in 2014/2015 claimed that they would include gradient mesh, and we are in 2020 now and it is not there. Gradient mesh is not mathematically difficult in any manner. It relies on drawing percentages between defined points on a grid, which, is super, duper, incredibly elementary. There is no reason we should be waiting on this. I thought the reason was that they were testing it with Adobe Illustrator and perfecting it so any imported mesh appeared identical but, it appears instead somebody just got drunk and posted it on their roadmap, because there is zero, I repeat, zero point zero zero zero zero zero progress on gradient mesh in six years. Oh well. I bought CorelDraw three years ago and have never used it, but, I guess now I'll spend money on the latest upgrade and learn. I was hoping to stay with Serif. Thanks anyway.
  4. Thanks, yes, but the question is, which will work best? I imagine someone here has done this, at least when Affinity was new. Someone must have tried all of the options to get an Affinity design into Drawplus X8 and figured out the most optimal settings. I mean, I would think that nobody knows better than Serif as to how Drawplus reads a PDF or an EPS or an SVG, and nobody knows better than Serif as how Affinity writes those files, so, the question of, how to best write a file from Affinity to be read by DrawPlus is reasonable to ask here. For example, I would guess that Affinity writes a newer form of SVG than Drawplus reads, would that assumption be correct? I would also imagine that EPS flattens more than PDF but I am unsure there. Does Affinity flatten an EPS more than a PDF? I would also guess Drawplus has better support for a PDF than an EPS, since PDF support dates to around X2 and EPS was new in X8. Will Drawplus be better with a PDF made by Affinity Designer or an EPS made by Affinity Designer? These are the sorts of things I am wanting to know. Thank you for your response.
  5. Hello, I am a stubborn lifetime Serif user. I have used Drawplus since I was 17 years old when version 4 was free and version 6 was new. I loved it and still use X8 today. I said I would not buy Affinity Designer until it has a gradient mesh tool but, I just want it too much. I am probably going to buy it today. Okay, so, with that decision, here is my question. It is both an Affinity and a CommunityPlus question so I will ask both places but I feel this may be the better place to ask. If I wanted to make an illustration in Affinity Designer, then export it in a format that DrawPlus X8 can read, and then use DrawPlus X8 to add a few meshes here and there, possibly add a missing nose to a face or add a complex glare to a shaped metal item, which format would be the best one to export my Designer image in? I think my choices are probably svg eps smf and maybe pdf. I thought perhaps since these programs are from the same devs, perhaps one of these formats out of Designer would be read well by DrawPlus X8. Sure, elements will need to be flattened, no doubt, but, which format will keep the most? If it is better that I use CorelDraw or Inkscape for the final mesh phase that works also, just let me know, but I prefer Drawplus overall, which is why I am excited to learn Designer finally. CorelDraw is sort of famous for having wider format import support than many, so that may be better if there is a good format I do not know of that Affinity Designer and CorelDraw both support but DrawPlus X8 does not support. I am not very in the know on new formats or which vector formats Affinity is best with. PSD is great for collaborating on rasters but it is unclear which is the best one to collaborate with different software for a vector design. I do not subscribe to software, but aside from soon having Designer, I have Serif DrawPlus X8, CorelDraw X8, and can install Inkscape if needed. Since this is not a CorelDraw forum I will post the import formats supported by my version of Corel. The goal again is to export an Affinity Designer image to a program that has a mesh vector fill for a final edit and to retain as many vectors as vectors as possible, flattening as little as necessary of the Designer image in the transition to the other program. Here are the common files CorelDraw imports. There is a longer list at the link. • Adobe Illustrator (AI)• Adobe Type 1 Font (PFB)• Windows Bitmap (BMP)• OS/2 Bitmap (BMP)• Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM)• CorelDRAW (CDR)• Corel Presentation Exchange (CMX)• Corel PHOTO-PAINT (CPT)• Corel Symbol Library (CSL)• Cursor Resource (CUR)• Microsoft Word (DOC, DOCX, or RTF)• Microsoft Publisher (PUB)• Corel DESIGNER (DES, DSF, DS4, or DRW)• AutoCAD Drawing Database (DWG) and AutoCAD Drawing Interchange Format (DXF)• Encapsulated PostScript (EPS)• PostScript (PS or PRN)• GIF• JPEG (JPG)• JPEG 2000 (JP2)• Kodak Photo CD Image (PCD)• PICT (PCT)• PaintBrush (PCX)• Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF)• HPGL Plotter File (PLT)• Portable Network Graphics (PNG)• Adobe Photoshop (PSD)• Corel Painter (RIF)• Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)• Adobe Flash (SWF)• TARGA (TGA)• TIFF• Corel Paint Shop Pro (PSP)• TrueType Font (TTF)• Visio (VSD)• WordPerfect Document (WPD)• WordPerfect Graphic (WPG)• RAW camera file formats• Wavelet Compressed Bitmap (WI)• Windows Metafile Format (WMF) https://support.corel.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005407707-CorelDRAW-Graphics-Suite-X8-Supported-file-formats Thank you.
  6. The CommunityPlus Forum does not appear to be overseen by Serif employees so I doubt anyone there could help me. Where did that occur? Can you link an article or something? Thanks. It seems odd and perhaps a bit selfish for them to advertise that they use open source software but to then not want to support open source. https://www.serif.com/licences/
  7. Hello, I was not sure where to post this. I am trying to find out if there is any possibility that whoever owns the codebase to Serif Drawplus X8 might consider selling it to the open source community? I understand certain components are third party commercial software and these would not be included, however, I am guessing it will not be beyond FOSS to replace them with existent open source components in fairly short order. Inkscape and Xara are decent but, Drawplus as an open source resource would be game changing for Linux. Large parts work in Wine already, and once the third party commercial stuff is gone, I am guessing it may mostly work with very little tweaking. At minimum it would be great for Windows users, because Inkscape is just so strange in how it is set up. Drawplus is a breeze to learn. I have thought of quite a few mods I would like to write to handle certain tasks but that is not possible without the source code or a mod or complex macro system. These are things we could add if it was an open source program. If anybody here knows how to contact the present owners of the software to communicate about this potential, let me know. If I knew they would sell, but only for X hundred thousand or million dollars, it would be very helpful. If they are totally unwilling to sell, that would be unfortunate, but everyone has a price, and that software is dead otherwise as far as I know. Thanks for any suggestions, and sorry to the mods for the probably wrong location for the thread. Move it where it needs to go. Have a good day.
  8. That is unfortunate to hear. More unfortunate is that not a single actual employee gave enough of a crap to respond in the past 100 days. I was sad about leaving the Serif community, but it is clearly spiraling the drain anyway. I am hopeful that the open source community will be able to purchase the DrawPlus code base someday as that was a good product. Affinity Designer without mesh after five years of promises seems to be a totally lost cause. I am done waiting. Corel gets my money now.
  9. Hello, I am a very longtime Serif software user. Over the years I have had the following products. Serif Drawplus 4 Serif Drawplus 6 Serif Drawplus 7 Serif Drawplus 8 Serif Drawplus X2 Serif Drawplus X4 Serif Drawplus X8 Serif Webplus 10 I still use Serif Drawplus X8 almost exclusively, though I own a more recent version of CorelDraw. I prefer Drawplus overall. I would like to move to Affinity Designer soon, however, for the past 5 YEARS I have seen threads again and again with an employee claiming that gradient mesh is on the road map. I absolutely cannot switch to any product that does not offer gradient mesh as I use it in almost every project I create. There is no better way to produce a photo realistic nose on a face in my opinion. I simply will not buy a program without it while I can use Drawplus, CorelDraw, or even Inkscape and find the tool there. I have been waiting, for five years, to see an announcement that Affinity Designer has gradient mesh. I am almost done waiting. I need to know, definitively, will it come out this calendar year? If not, I will permanently move to CorelDraw. I would very much prefer to stick with you. Can you please give me more information than a vague statement that it is on a roadmap? Roadmaps typically finish out in less than half a decade. Is this actually going to occur? If you decided not to do it, that is fine. I am okay with moving to another product but I am tired of waiting for something this board was told in 2016 would eventually come out. Please have the courtesy to tell a life long supporter of your products if this is worth waiting for or not. Thank you.
  10. I'm afraid I may have missed your point. I understand enough about programming and vector mathematics to know that a gradient mesh is a fairly basic series of mathematical computations once you have a reasonably-complex base in place, which it appears you do. Inkscape, as an example, has had side-implementations of gradient mesh for years, but in that case, the SVG format has rather limited the program's capability to support gradient mesh as a standard, but over on the Affinity Designer front, it makes little sense to me as to why it would take this long to implement something that clearly already has all of the prerequisites long-finished. Mesh is vector, it doesn't fit any raster or pixel-painting definition. I bought Corel Draw now, to use the vector-based mesh system they have designed, which is fine enough I suppose. So, no, I don't really understand the reference to "pixel-painting away from my vectors," perhaps you could clarify. Did you think I said PaintShop Pro or something? That's a different software package. Point taken. "Rinky-dink" was going too far, my apologies. However, in the same light, I can point you to some galleries showing you some absolutely amazing artwork produced in Inkscape, and, I suppose at the moment, I'd put Inkscape and Affinity Designer on even footing, since neither support gradient mesh and neither support .DPP format. No doubt about it, there are some incredible pieces designed in Affinity Designer, and you guys have done a tremendous job designing the software. I truly mean that, and I wish you continued success. Nobody expected Serif to make Affinity Designer take the Mac world by storm the way it did, and that was impressive, even if you did sort of abandon us Windows users for a while there. :) Also, my neighbor makes amazing paintings with a brush on a piece of canvas. If I put a brush to a piece of canvas, you'd have some nicely ruined canvas. My point is, yes, many designers can clearly use your software to make incredible stuff that frankly, I couldn't make. Same with Google Tilt Brush, same with a lot of things. I tend to have difficulty holding a brush or stylus for long periods, so I use a mouse. I spend hundreds of hours detailing vast meshes, and then I put 40 or 50 of them together into my illustrations. I really love doing it, and they look great in the end, and are infinitely scalable from a stamp to a wall. That's why I like designing in mesh in vectors, But, you're right, absolutely. It's not "rinky-dink" and I shouldn't have said that. It's production-quality, but critically lacks an important tool for my uses. For the record, the sole reason I bought Drawplus 7 way back when was that I was shocked it supported gradient mesh, so, it's probably just that I got used to your software prioritizing that feature more. Yes, this is true. I suppose it comes down to what I expected as to your release schedule. In general, I've notice that your software turns about every two years lately. Starting with Drawplus 7 and continuing to the last release, you released new versions in 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, and 2015. Your roadmap which lists gradient mesh, indicates that it is a feature planned for the Version 1 software of Affinity Designer, which means, starting from 2015, it's reasonable to expect it to be done by 2017. It seems perhaps you've changed to a different release style, where it will take you much longer than two years to progress between versions. I'm not sure. At times, it looks like Affinity Designer will be abandoned so that you can focus on your iOS priorities. It's hard to tell, from out here, when the best answer anyone can get is... how did you put it? Yes, right. Great. How about pushing it to your version 2 roadmap? Are you really still finishing up your version 1 software 3 years after it hit Mac? Seems odd, but okay. If that's the way you're running things, good enough, I guess. I don't think it's a winning strategy, but, if it's working, keep doing it. I'm hoping maybe Serif will consider selling Drawplus to the open source community in a similar way to how Blender came out, I think we can crowd-fund a million bucks to open source Drawplus. But, that's probably a really long shot Serif would consider that. It's a shame Drawplus has to die when Designer it still not feature-equivalent. Okay. Fair enough. Perhaps I'll still buy it eventually. I apologize for any name-calling or negativity, I've been following this thread for two years and hadn't seen it for a while, and when I saw, again, in 2017, there was a new post from Serif that still couldn't even make a guess as to when gradient mesh will come, I vented my frustration. Apologies, but, I hope you will consider pushing it off onto your V2 roadmap at the minimum, because it's weird to be on the V1 roadmap and not be done yet. Maybe you don't agree. Either way, thanks and have a good one.
  11. You know it's wonderful that you guys have all of these nifty pie-in-the-sky ideas as to what mesh might be or might not be in your new program, but it's been three years now. This is getting extremely trying. For my uses, this software is a sort of a rinky-dink app, until there's mesh gradient. I use serif drawplus X8 very regularly, and love it, and I would like to love Affinity designer also, but the mesh gradient tool is the absolute most important tool I use, I will not waste any time learning anything in Affinity designer until such time that you have a mesh tool that is every bit as capable as the one in Drawplus. You could charge $500 for the software, and I would buy it if it had gradient mesh. You could charge $5 for the software, and I'd still scoff at it if it didn't include gradient mesh. But the really sad thing is that you've been talking about adding it for 3 years now, and even in a post this year in this thread all you can say is that it's on your roadmap. On your roadmap for when? When exactly is this roadmap going to start occurring? What is it that you're actually concentrating on right now? Affinity designer getting to a mesh stage is starting to seem about as likely as taking a road trip from California to Beijing playing Destiny on a Nintendo Switch. It reminds me of waiting for the 3DO M2 to come out, or the Phantom, or the Indrema. It reminds me of waiting for Duke Nukem Forever. I can only hope it will be earth-shattering when it finally arrives because I can't really imagine what's taking this long. So go ahead and take your time, take all the time you need, because in that time I'll be learning all about how to use my latest purchase, which is the newest version of coreldraw. Maybe by the time you guys actually release a worthwhile product, I'll still be interested in purchasing it. I sort of doubt it. Best of luck though. All told I waited 2 years for you guys to actually get this together. I waited two years before I decided to make a different purchase. I'm not going to go with the Creative Cloud, so Adobe lost me, and I really wanted the purchase to be Affinity designer, but gradient mesh is critically important no two ways about it. So I finally dropped $500 on Corel, and it's pretty unlikely that I'm going to be coming back to Serif, you probably just lost a customer. For the record, I have purchased Drawplus 7, 8, X2, X4, and X8, as well as Webplus 10 and several random Serif packages (fonts, etc.). I'm a long-time Serif customer and I really appreciate everything that you guys have contributed to the art world, but I just couldn't wait any longer. I had to make my purchase, and now that I'm learning Corel I don't think I'm going to be back. But thanks for the great times! On a final note, I will say this: what really irritates me is not that you haven't added the feature, but that you keep dicking people around promising that you're going to get there eventually with no guess as to when that might be. I figured it would be within a couple of years, so I waited. I shouldn't have. If I hadn't waited, and had just gotten a version of Corel back then, then chances are I might have purchased Affinity designer anyway just to see the other cool things that it can do. But I waited because you guys said it was coming, and the more I waited the more irritated I got that it doesn't seem to be happening. So at this point I'm just very frustrated overall with the lack of progress and the lack of any estimate as to when it might occur, and the obvious fact that your developers are concentrating their resources elsewhere on other applications prior to your roadmap being anywhere near complete for the first one. I suppose I'd rather support developers that can actually deliver on their promises, and who don't make promises they can't deliver on.
  12. Hello, I'm an avid and longtime Drawplus user, since version 7 (4 if you count the free version I tried at that time prior to buying 7). Anyway, I've been watching the Affinity software with much interest ever since I first heard of the Mac version years ago (though I'm a diehard Thinkpad Trackpoint user so I don't have a Mac), and I was very happy to see the Windows version is here. However, one thing I've noticed is this... on April 25, 2015, a Moderator named MEB said: "Yes, we will have a Mesh fill tool, it's already on our roadmap to be implemented. I don't believe it will be available so soon. It's a complex tool and takes some time to develop, but it's planned for a future version." Then, on April 28, 2016, a year later, the same Moderator, MEB, said: "For example there's no contours/offset or equivalent tool in Affinity Designer, so there's no way to keep those features editable in Affinity other than import the flattened/backed shape. And this you can also get if you export the file as a PDF from DrawPlus. Same for gradient meshes and several other features which currently doesn't exist in Affinity Designer and will eventually be implemented/approached in a totally different way (with respect to code)." Now, I'm not trying to rush anything, but, I use gradient mesh heavily in my illustrations. My current illustration has at least 45 meshes in it. I can't imagine not having gradient mesh, so, for the time, I'll stick with Drawplus. But, I wanted to ask... is there any vague guess or idea as to when gradient mesh might appear? Is it a potential for this year, or next? Or will it be longer than that? Again, no rush, just wondering. Thank you.
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