Medical Officer Bones

@LondonSquirrel I feel you are missing the overall trend of webp usage and popularity. I see a parallel trend with WebP compared to SVG. It took SVG a LONG while before it finally took off - but when it did... What I find most interesting is that it took SVG 4 years, more or less, to get where WebP arrived at in only 11 months time. The 600% increase in this short time is quite telling, in my opinion. While it is still early days, I expect WebP usage to at least triple in the next 12-16 months. We see that at this point that 8.2% of the top 10,000 sites use WebP for image delivery. Which makes sense: bandwidth costs money, and WebP saves bandwidth. But also because developers of the top segments tend to be more forward-thinking to remain competitive. Another reason why I forecast a dramatic increased uptake of WebP rather sooner than later. And very simply for smaller websites it means faster loading times and an improved user experience. These things, and the increased awareness. In my classes more and more webp is used by the students. Most design software can now export WebP, even if it requires a plugin (looking at you, Adobe!). The genie is out of the bottle. It is up to the Affinity devs to keep up with these developments and obvious trends. If not, they'll be left behind.

The main issue is that "industry standard" design and animation software still do not support the export of webp. It's a bit of a chicken and egg situation. Luckily the situation is changing: Krita 5 supports both APNG and animated WebP files, as does PhotoLine. Plugins exist for Photoshop to do the same. And WebP is gaining popularity. Simply stated: things are possible with WebP that are not possible with (A)PNG or other file formats or coded solutions that eat up much more bandwidth. This has an impact on the user experience from both the perspective of load times as well as eye-candy, and as such, it is steadfastly growing. As a large web-based business you'd be plain losing money on bandwidth if you keep ignoring webp. @LondonSquirrel You seem to ignore the fact that the uptake of webp grew by 600% in 2021 only, and that it is the most popular image file format now with high traffic sites. I interpret those figures as a NEED to support WebP export rather sooner than later. The context of that 3% tells a very different story in my opinion. And it is not only a useful format for the web: game engines support this format now as well. It is an effective and flexible image file format - the only one that supports a superset of all the other graphic file formats: both lossy and non-lossy, full alpha, animation, EXIF/ICC Profile/XMP support,... Nope, everything indicates that the use of webp will only grow and grow. It is very, very dumb on the part of the Serif devs to keep ignoring webp. I mean, they are behind: animated PNG and WebP support is growing, and Affinity can't even export a static WebP file.

? Photoshop never did and still does not support the APNG format (at least, not without a plugin). In any case, for those who wish to convert their animations to APNG or Animated WebP files, download the latest Krita 5 beta and FFmpeg. Krita 5 exports directly to APNG and animated WebP via FFmpeg. And it is free & open source.

Same in Windows: It's very inconsistent and, what's more, irrational behaviour in Photo. Photo does open a 1 million px wide PNG image that I saved from PhotoLine, but refuses to resave the same PNG file at its original dimensions. Why allow for the import of higher than 32768px wide PNG files, if the application blocks saving those same files it opens correctly? That makes little sense: on the one hand insisting that PNG files 'officially' only support up to 32768px wide and high bitmaps, but on the other hand still supporting the import of far higher resolution PNG files. That is very illogical ambiguous software behaviour. Besides, it seems only Affinity Photo enforces these arbitrary PNG export size limits: all other software that I use supports saving higher resolution PNG files. Krita also saves such PNG files without issues (including the 1 million px wide PNG file), for example. ClipStudio has no qualms exporting a 100.000px wide PNG file. Irfanview imports and exports much larger PNG files. Photoshop actually limits file format choices for saving a 250.000 pixel file to PSB, TIFF, and PNG - other file formats are excluded, meaning the PS developers chose PNG as one of the few file formats capable of saving such files! And as @fde101 reiterates: the max width or height is limited to (2^31)-1: 2,147,483,647 . I wonder if the developer implementing PNG export misread the PNG format specs. 😉

It no longer does. Adobe gave up on maintaining the 3D features in Photoshop. They are now officially deprecated. You are aware of alternatives, such as: 3DCoatTextura https://pilgway.com/product/3dcoattextura ArmorPaint https://armorpaint.org/ MaterialMaker https://www.materialmaker.org/ Quixel Mixer https://quixel.com/mixer And it is possible to paint with layers in Blender with this plugin: https://blendermarket.com/products/pbr-painter Many of these have a bridge to open the texture in an external image editor for round-trip editing.

Have you considered using proxies? Create lower resolution versions of your renders in Photo and link-place those and work on the layouts. Then when you are finished, relink (I assume you are linking instead of embedding!!!) and replace the low resolution proxies with the high resolution versions. Use the Resource Manager to accomplish this in Publisher. Then export to PDF (if Publisher still chokes, work in smaller sections, and use a tool like PDF Exchange Editor (or Acrobat) to collate all pages).

That is already possible: Blender imports SVG (both as curves for 3D extrusions, etc., and as a Grease Pencil object for 2D animation) and imports the common image file formats as a source for textures. Same for Maya and other 3d apps. Perhaps be a bit more specific what you are missing in this respect? It would be nice to have improved normal map support: for example a combine normal map mode similar to Krita.

In Photoshop and PhotoLine Filter Forge is non-destructive when applied to a smart object (Photoshop) or Placeholder layer (PhotoLine's smart object version). It works really well.

Perhaps Filter forge might fit the bill in the meantime? Full nodal filter construction.

Ah yes, I recall that discussion at the time. 🙂 Here is an updated article from the same site 4 years later: https://pvs-studio.com/en/blog/posts/cpp/0720/ It really was more of a discussion about using PVS to analyze a larger project's code quality (PVS is their product). It is used to identify " bad practices" in coding, and obviously the open sourcing of a once-commercial product provided a great opportunity to make some waves on the net for their PVS code quality checking. I believe they did a similar test with Blender's source code. Not sure. Overall it bears little weight as to the quality and functionality of OT, of course. Although it may create a more unstable running app. But really, OT runs well on my system now. Really no comparison with the first version (which was BAAAD!!!). I did some crazy timeline things today, and it hasn't crashed on me even once. It runs fine now (at least on Windows. I have no experience with the Mac side of things!) Not trying to convince anyone. I just thought there were some outdated/uninformed notions posted in this thread about OpenToonz. And yes, I do like to work with OpenToonz: it fits my workflow very well. But as you say: what works for one person may not work for another person. I think it is great we have so many options now, because I recall a time only expensive production-level 2d animation software was available. Now any animator can access high-grade animation software for free. As I wrote earlier, it works a bit different in OT compared to TVPaint: because the drawings are decoupled from the timeline, selecting frames and how these are selected becomes more important. To make it work, select a range of frames. Then the handle appears at the end. This is actually quite neat, because if a pattern of frames is selected, it will repeat that pattern - even across multiple layers!. To decrease the exposure, select a range, and then drag the handle to the left. Also, if you hold down CTRL a handle will appear at the start of a sequence, allowing for increasing and decreasing the duration of a sequence from the left (start). TVPaint does make it easier to drag sequences over other sequences & replace them. As I said, some timeline things work better in OT, other things better in TVP. I do very much miss nested timelines, though. Btw, after playing around with TVPaint I was pleasantly surprised by the nice fluid animation workflow. Definitely got some nice improvements since I last tested it. So at the very least your post here made me very curious about TVPaint once more. That depends! Blender's Long Term Support version is aimed at providing good support for studios. That was definitely a good move by the Blender Foundation and motivated more studios to adopt Blender in their pipelines. And OpenToonz's lead developer works for Japanese animation studios and is directly responsible for adding requested features and debugging OT when the animators run into issues. Vice versa (playing the devil's advocate here): Affinity users have been requesting a number of expected and basic features for a VERY long time now, and those are still not implemented. The reality of software development is a little more complicated than merely a matter of " free/open source" versus " commercial" business models.

Challenge accepted! I downloaded the trial version of TVPaint which is fully functional but for saving work, and I spent the afternoon hours in it. It's improved quite a bit since I last tested it 8~10 years ago, or so. So here are my discoveries, be they as they may rather shallow ones, and if I get anything wrong here, please correct me. Focusing on the timeline only: Things I liked the head and tail instance handles work well and fast. OpenToonz has similar options, but it takes an extra step for the head. timeline works well (minus my major gripe regarding nested timelines see below) layers in timeline offer regular layer blending (not possible in OpenToonz: the layer workflow is different, and requires the nodal compositor) thumbnail preview in the timeline is nice. And the layers are collapsible, which I love (and use in for example Resolve) I really like Image Marking in TVPaint. Great to indicate keys, extremes, inbetweens,... Would like this in OpenToonz, because I often want to differentiate between these. ToonBoom has a similar feature, but not as good. The Flip feature is also pretty cool. Very much like this, and haven't seen it implemented like that before. Timeline is easily controllable with the keyboard. Things I disliked: OpenToonz offers very efficient and convenient drawing substitution (ClipStudio works the same in this sense). Basically, drawings and the timeline are uncoupled, allowing for easy drawing recycling. For example, I have a character with various expressions. I create a layer with a bunch of expressions. Now I can easily reuse those drawings in the timeline. When I update one of the drawings, all instances update! This also works with sub-Xsheets/timelines, which allow for multi-layered embedded timelines. Very flexible system. I looked in TVPaint for something similar, but came up short. Are the drawings somehow separable from the timeline, or not? I hope so. Talking about sub-Xsheets: in OpenToonz it is efficient and simple to create nested timelines. Any animation timeline/x-sheet may be placed in another timeline as a nested timeline. In this sense they work like Graphic Symbols in Flash/Animate CC. I missed a similar feature in TVPaint. I checked the TVPaint forums, but this (rather essential option in my opinion) is not supported. That's a show-stopper for me personally: I can't imagine working without such a basic feature. A simple retiming on 1s, 2s, and 3s seems to be missing? I noticed there are scripts, so perhaps someone wrote a script for this? In OpenToonz the timeline allows block selection and dragging of frames across multiple layers. This doesn't seem to be possible in TVPaint. Onion skinning is much more convenient and flexible in OpenToonz: it is much better integrated in the timeline. Not sure about this one, but I missed a similar feature as Shift & Trace in TVPaint: it allows for keys/extremes/inbetweens to be temporarily moved/rotated to draw new inbetweens on the exact spot where they need to be. It's like grabbing one of the animation sheets, and moving it on a light table under your new drawing as a reference. This works directly in the timeline. Very handy. While I sorta like the project manager with clips in TVPaint, I prefer to work with the X-sheet/timeline and sub-Xsheets to generate a master. This also allows for all the timeline features such as onion skinning for example, which is not possible in the project manager with clips in TVPaint. It feels needlessly restricting in my view. It seems the lack of sub-timelines is complicating project management somewhat? Besides, it feels a bit like a cross between an X-sheet and a non-linear video editor, but falls short of either as far as I can tell after this brief exploration. Simple tweening (transformations) of drawings/content is terrible in TVPaint: it is all done in a separated fragmented workflow via the 'Keyframer effect'. In OpenToonz it is integrated in the timeline, with easy to identify timeline keys. Almost unusable for me in TVP. Who came up with that?! Same for the camera: in OpenToonz cameras are part of the timeline (which they should be in my opinion), and may be keyed/transformed/tweened. In TVPaint however the camera is part of the effect stack?! Just plain silly! Why over-complicate camera work? In short, the lack of sub-timelines is one of the dealbreakers for me. As are the way cameras are (not) handled in the timeline. But other things are missing as well, which I take for granted: obviously no vector drawing support. That's a big one! Toonboom, Flash/Animate, CelAction,... All support this. OpenToonz and Toonboom both allow for conversion from bitmap to vector as well. It does limit the usage scope of TVPaint in my opinion. Frame-by-frame animation with vector support is brilliant for that clean look, and can be scaled without issues for different resolutions. It is a major reason why ToonBoom is used for a lot of work and why Flash was used in the past. - the way effects are handled in TVPaint via the FX stack is rather (sorry) horrible. In OpenToonz a nodal editor is used. Same in ToonBoom. - In OpenToonz a special raster/bitmap layer exists that keeps track of palettized colours. Which means both vectors AND bitmap brush colours are editable at all times. - aside from great frame-by-frame animation options, OpenToonz also provides quite nice automatic tweening. Even vector drawings can be tweened for quite automatic inbetweens instead of having to draw them from scratch. In short: I quite liked the frame-by-frame bitmap animation tools in TVPaint, and it offers some interesting features. But it also lacks a number of rather essential features which come free with OpenToonz and are part of other commercial software as well. And TVPaint implements a number of features in a very awkward manner (effects stack, tweening,camera,...). The project setup was interesting, but I do prefer the way animation projects are set up in OpenToonz. As for storyboarding, WonderUnit Storyboarder is excellent, albeit not directly integrated in the animation software like TVPaint. But free and very capable. Please share with us the link to that article, please. What is "crooked code" exactly? I worked all day with both OpenToonz and TVPaint, doing the same things, and neither crashed. Yes, OpenToonz in the early days was horrifically unstable, and crashed time after time. Nowadays this is no longer the case. What does that exactly mean? Blender is incredibly successful, and is now used all over the world for work by artists and studios of all levels. Krita is stable and arguably one of the best digital drawing apps out there. Wonderunit Storyboarder is excellent and stable. OpenToonz is used and stable enough for large-scale feature productions. Now you are shifting the goal posts... Japanese examples do not count? Have you seen TVPaint's website recently? It is also used by Japanese animators and studios - the site uses this to advertize their product! So those Japanese productions do not count either? If anything, Japanese traditional frame-by-frame animation is mightily impressive. It serves as an example. (Yes, there is factory-work stuff as well, just like in the West!) Anyway, all animation apps have their ups and downs. I think that the "perfect" animation software cannot exist, because it depends too much on the workflow of the individual animator and animation studio requirements. Would I use TVPaint in my own work? No. It is too focused on bitmap frame-by-frame only, and it is really quirky in some areas - too non-standard and quirky for me. But if I was asked to use it within a team, I would have no qualms about it.

Again, an untrue statement. OpenToonz is actively being developed, and the lead (Japanese) developer implemented and still is working on direct requests from studios in Japan. You do realize that OT was (and still is) used in the full production pipeline of feature-length 2d animation films in the past few years? It is production proven. Now, you may not like it - but based on your comments above, I presume you have only played around with it, and haven't spent much time in it. Similar to how you downloaded Moho Debut, and claimed it is 'useless', while again Moho Pro has been used in major feature films in the past few years for various sequences. Your comments seem to be based on hardly any in-depth personal experience with either software. OpenToonz's pipeline and workflow is very effective. In particular when combined with ClipStudio. And in my opinion it is a very comfortable animation experience for frame-by-frame. But not for every type of animation like cut-out animation. All animation software has its pros and cons. And personal preferences also play an important role, of course. Anyway, do I think it would be interesting to see new 2d animation software enter the market? Yes, I do. I completely agree with you that renting software is great for studios, not that great for freelance animators. I don't think Serif will wager a bet on the 2d animation software market, though. It is too niche. Still, I would like to see a basic animation timeline in Affinity Photo/Designer.

That is why I mentioned Krita works well together with OpenToonz. I have worked in ToonBoom for Disney work, and actually prefer OpenToonz/ClipStudio for my own work.

You are entirely wrong. https://opentoonz.github.io/e/usecase.html

Its brother OpenToonz is used in feature film and broadcast Anime production in Japan. I like it very much for 2d animation work myself. Works great with ClipStudio, which exports frame-by-frame directly into OpenToonz. Or combine with Krita, which has nice frame-by-frame animation and superb bitmap drawing tools.

As a work-around for opening Affinity files on Chromebooks / Android, visit PhotoPea in your browser, and load the Affinity file. https://www.photopea.com/ It does not export Affinity files, however, and must be saved as PSD. But it may be a way for you to work on stuff on both platforms.

Why bother with 1bit transparency anymore at this point in time? Browsers support full webp transparency and PNG transparency, as well as animated WebP and APNG files. GIF and Animated GIF files have pretty terrible file size optimization compared to the other more modern formats, and only support up to 256 colours anyway. I see no use case anymore at this point for the GIF format.

Moho is awesome for 2d animated cut-out vector based 'puppets'! When the original developer decided to take over Moho's development again and acquired it back from Smith Micro, I jumped a hole in the air. Best news in ages for the app. As you are aware, Moho isn't that great at frame-by-frame. I use OpenToonz for this, and it supports a fully vector-based workflow, with very good colouring automation tools. ClipStudio outputs directly to OpenToonz, btw. Ah, I remember Fireworks. I still have FW CS6 running on my machine for the odd file conversion. Camtasia for rendering GIFs? You are a brave man. Wow. If you are interested, either OpenToonz or PhotoLine will provide much more control. In fact, PhotoLine uses very much the same layer-based approach as Fireworks did: animate using layers, and export to a gif animation. There's even an animate layers control panel. Each layer may be separately optimized and have its own colour palette. But this isn't really necessary anymore, because... The latest beta of PhotoLine added animated PNG and WebP support, which vastly expand the possibilities for animation on the web with full colour and transparency support! Something sorely missing in GIF based animations, as you probably know (only 1bit transparency and a limit of 256 colours). As far as I am aware, PhotoLine is now the only image editor in the world with support for the newer web animation file formats. It works pretty much the same as Fireworks, barring some things, of course. Also, OpenToonz imports and export GIF animations without any issue either. Just make sure to point it to FFMPEG in the preferences, and work with GIF animations and a true frame-by-frame timeline.

I agree it would be handy (and expected) to display the current image/layer dimensions in the info panel. I would also expect to see it displayed there, instead of "Memory Efficiency" or "Memory pressure", which seem quite useless to me. In fact, the Info panel already displays the colour mode, bit depth, and colour profile, so it is somewhat incomprehensible that basic image properties such as image / layer dimensions are omitted. Or just in the bottom bar at the right, or something. It wouldn't take up any extra space. Combine this with a current layer size would be quite handy as well and not necessitate the use of an extra transform panel. Or a simple option to include the dimensions in the displayed title, just like some of the alternatives do. And the behaviour of the move tool is inconsistent in that it will display the layer size of an image layer, but not of a pixel layer or background layer in the tool properties. Instead it *does* display the PPI value for all of them - so why not their pixel dimensions? PPI is a useless value unless the actual pixel dimensions are known! For example. To figure out the dimensions and PPI of a pixel layer, I must open the transform panel to inspect that layer's dimensions, select the move tool, and read the PPI values in the tool's properties bar. Which is somewhat awkward, to say the very least. (not mentioning the mid-tinted grey used to display that PPI value, which makes it unnecessarily hard to distinguish and read...) Conversely, to figure out the dimensions and PPI values of a placed image layer, I merely must select the move tool, and both values are displayed in the toolbar (in white text!). In any case, I don't believe this Hand tool trick has been mentioned yet: - With any tool active (other than the Hand tool) press H: the current document dimensions are displayed in the top left toolbar properties. Press H a second time to return to your active tool. This is quick and effective to note the current document dimensions, and switch back to what you were doing. Unfortunately it still doesn't fix the incoherencies and inconsistencies related to the move tool and the lack of a consolidated group of image/layer property values displayed in one location in the GUI. But at least it allows for a quick document resolution check.

FilterForge is a terrific plugin that specifically supports Affinity Photo. FF includes a number of different normal map filters and bump map ones. It also is a great general texture generator with PBR support and up to 65000x65000 seamless texture export with normal map, metallic map, roughness map, occlusion map and height map automatically generated as well. https://www.filterforge.com/ But yes, would be nice to have built-in support like Krita.

That's great news! I had not expected it to work with pages. At least there's an exit possible now for FW users and their files.

The developer of Photopea (an online-only Photoshop clone) implemented Fireworks file support last December. It works quite well, and allows us to convert FW files to PSD versions (which can be loaded in Affinity). Not sure about pages, though... photopea.com/

Yes, still in development: the latest update was march 2021. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.krita Perhaps use cloud based software such as Photopea? It's a Photoshop clone working in the browser. As long as your device can run a modern browser, all your files are shared via the same account. https://www.photopea.com/

Yes, we are still waiting. In the meantime other apps are starting to implement animated (!) webp export. We can but wait. Or use other apps to do the conversion. I very much like the free Color Quantizer which also exports to WebP - if you are on Windows, that is.

Well, true 1bit support will never be added. They unequivocally stated that last year. Which is a bit of a problem for a variety of professional print production scenarios. Otherwise? No idea. Let's hope for the best, expect to be disappointed. That is my outlook in regards to Affinity. (And I am very hopeful. 🙂 )