Mouse

Ah, now that might work out, though it is a bit odd that the quality of the result relies so much on the blend mode being used on an effect. Thanks again for your help

A lifetime of experimentation is how I got to where I am, so I appreciate it when others add their effort to mine.

Thanks for trying, lacerto

Thanks for your help NotMyFault

Here is the result of exporting a scaled png after merging everything. It's good, but I need to keep the originals as they are, not merged. For now it is easier for me export at full size and scale in GIMP. Do you know if there are any updates planned for the way scaling is done during export?

This is the 400% zoom of the full scale original This is the 400% zoom of the version I scaled during export from Affinity And this is the one I scaled down in GIMP from the full size export.

It's an AD file. I hope that's ok? I rarely work in Photo unless I have to deform a bitmap. Poleaxe 01.afdesign

Hi I'm drawing a large set of fantasy mapping assets using Affinity Designer. This is part of a sheet of various weapons in the collection. I'm having an issue with the very fine point of this polygon on the poleaxe spear point, which vanishes into a black line more and more as you zoom out. Zoomed in, it looks like this I'm drawing these images much larger than they need to be in order to get the detail correct without too much fiddling around, but when I scale them down to the correct size when I export the poleaxe I get that same black line where the tip of that polygon has vanished. In this screen shot (below) the first image is the full scale export from Affinity. The second one is the scaled export direct from Affinity, and the third one is the one I reduced in GIMP from the first full scale Affinity export. And here are the export settings I used when exporting the scaled image (centre above) directly from Affinity. Please can someone help? What am I doing wrong?

Thank you so much!

Hi Apologies if this is on the wrong sub-sub-sub forum. Please can you tell me how to uninstall an update and go back to V2.0? Either that, or can you help me export my pngs with transparent backgrounds instead of white ones? This is the default png export setting with a nice transparent background. And this is what happens when I try to modify any of the settings. The background has gone opaque. These are my preferred settings and worked perfectly in V2.0. That's why I want to go back to it if I can. Thanks for any help. Sue

I used dBase, Basic and Fortran when I first started work. Windows was still a couple of years down the road ;) Anyhow. My 10 day trial has run out, and since life has not allowed me to really put it through its paces I've made the decision to wait until the tablet problem is sorted out - that being the crux of the matter for me. There are other mitigating circumstances, like the fact that the electric bill has just arrived. I'll pop my head back in sometime around June or so, when I get my birthday money :) I was going to show you the only thing I managed to find time to create, but I can't work out your picture loading thingummy! LOL! No sweat - it wasn't that great.

That must have been what I used to see the older kids playing with when I was a newbie at upper school :) I'd never heard of computers back then (I was about 11), and I couldn't understand why all these older kids were getting so excited about producing a really long folding ribbon of punched paper that ended up in a cardboard box on the floor, and seemed to serve no purpose whatsoever! LOL!

Well, lets just say I'm old enough to have been a teenager in the days when computers didn't even necessarily have screens ;)

Affinity is certainly a lot lighter on the memory than most other apps of comparable quality (not that there are many of them) :) I use my Task Manager on detailed view to assess what's going on. Affinity doesn't sap the system even half as much as Krita doing the same things, and is also an improvement on GIMP. I'm thinking of getting some extra RAM - not just for this, but for all my graphics apps. It seems incredible to me that just a few years ago 512 Kb was all the range and more than enough for everything! :lol:

LOL! None taken. Truth is I blew up my desktop, which really was a mean machine with several HD and a RAID system, but when the main cooling fan breaks down in the middle of an 18 hour animation render from Blender, and you happen to be asleep, it soon fries everything before the fuse blows. Fills the room with a fair amount of smoke as well, till you throw it out of the window because its actually on fire! I was lucky I didn't loose the house as well as the PC. Still, never mind. I guess I'll be able to afford a new one, one day :) ... As for being a pro? No. I'm no pro. I'm a writer turned cartographer, because a fantasy novel just isn't the same without at least one decent quality map, and I can't afford to pay for someone else to draw it for me. Make no mistake - I'm seriously impressed by AP, and when I get around to AD I'll probably be just as impressed by that as well, but I do wish I could work out what to do about this brush delay problem, since it strikes at the very heart of my process, which is all about drawing, rather than enhancing something that's already there. No worries, though - I'll shut up now and just get on with it - keeping a beady eye on the updates to see when its fixed ;)

Ah well the problem must be the Intel, because I've done the same with AP just now (not a map, just a scribble with a load of effects and 20 layers), and it slows down a bit (to be expected), but it doesn't freeze up like Krita does. As a side note/observation AP does far better with limited RAM than most other graphics packages, but I expect that's because its not already carrying around a whole load of legacy code from the last 25 years ;) I usually use vector apps for the larger maps, which have potential for unlimited scale and can be exported as a series of 10000 x 10000 grid squares if necessary. One in particular that I use is a dedicated piece of mapping software, and the file size on that is rarely more than 1MB, because the bitmap fills and symbols are only ever referenced, rather than included in the file. I'll be trying AD when I have the time ;)

All my graphics apps use Visual C++. The tablet works perfectly with GIMP, and Krita, though Krita's usefulness to me is limited because its a memory glutton. Because of the size I like to work at (anything up to 8000 x 8000 pixels) Krita has a tendency to freeze up altogether, and then I have to use the Task Manager to force a shut down without saving my work. (digital maps have at least 20 layers, which doesn't help with Krita). I've only 4 GB RAM to play with ;)

Thanks guys :) I was fully intending to continue using GIMP/Campaign Cartographer 3/Corel suite 11 for fine drawing details while I wait for AP to evolve. I just thought it would be helpful of me to make a few suggestions as to what might be causing the delay. There is after all no solid proof that its 100% an Affinity problem ;) My graphics card is an Intel® HD Graphics 4000. I guess that since this is an HP Pavilion laptop (lower end of the range) its designed to be able to play DVDs quite nicely, but other than that I wouldn't know about any particular qualities/disadvantages.

I'm still scratching my head about all of this really. If its not a Wacom driver thing, then why is it that some Wacom tablets work ok, and some have this weird delay? Could it be as simple as a processing priority instruction - a processor problem, or a bus problem - speed? I have an Intel Pentium i3-32172 at 1.8 GHz. That's very low really compared to some machines. Maybe that's what's causing the problem. I mean... if all the Affinity coders are using wiz kid machines that make mine look like a pocket calculator, no wonder its impossible to see that there might be a problem with a lesser machine + tablet combination. Maybe we should be comparing processors and speed, rather than make of tablet?

Thanks for the compliment SrPx :) Tablet drivers - This is just a thought, but... if all of this delayed response thing is purely down to which drivers we all have installed, then maybe we should be taking this to Wacom, rather than putting these poor chaps and chappesses at Affinity through the hoops trying to get everything to work smoothly together from the wrong end?

Oh don't you worry. I'm really quite a wily old mouse (either that or insane :P)

Thanks for the added information :)

Thank you :D EDIT: I hope to do work like this with AP/AD one day ;)

Thanks Engine44 - you're right about this forum being pretty friendly. Its certainly very helpful :D

Wow, Thanks :D That's a lot to think about. I guess I do it differently with every map I make. They're all different. Here's my Cartographer's Guild album - it might give you some idea of just how mixed up and mongrel my 'style' (if I even have a style) really is. I get a bit bored of churning out maps that are all the same, so I go out of my way to make them all completely different to one another ;)