MmmMaarten

This time I've made a Cargo Van with interior for my Animation Short Film! 😊 Everything 2D (Textures everywhere and of course the Onscreen Titles) happily done in Affinity Designer again! Love vectors. ((logo-)Design, 3D Modeling, surfacing/texturing, rigging, animation, lighting, VFX, camera in Blender. And Sound Design/Foley. Also made the music for the sliding door demo video). And for who's interested in the 3d side of things: A closer look at the sliding door mechanism rig:

Great work! Love the cartoon style proportions

Thanks. Yeah, I guess it's a feature request than. Could you please move this thread to there?

Hi, when having two layers, both with their own mask, and merging these together with rightclick contextmenu --> merge layers, the resulting layer has a merged fill, but only uses one of both masks and removes the other mask. While I think we might expect them to merge the masks too. Photo 2.3.6 (in the screenrecording the popup window wasn't recorded, but I use the merge layers from the layer selection) merge-selected-not-working-photo.mp4

You totally missed the whole point I was making. If you didn't you would've understand that neither a VM with Windows nor a VM with macOS would help. Best advise I could give you is to read my post again (and follow the news 😉).

I totally feel you, but honestly I have good hope that since their takeover they put more time and man power into actually fixing things that are in the software for so long. If so it could be a matter of time before nasty long standing issues will be fixed. I keep my fingers crossed for that. BTW I've also just responded to your v1-issue-thread above to @stokerg. Hopefully they will finally pick this up.

Hi @stokerg , it's 4 years later now and thumbnail issues like these are still present in v2. These thumbnails are important to navigate through the file so I would expect this to get priority, but unfortunately I get the impression this is left untouched since. Currently I'm facing several thumbnail issues in a file, freshly created in Photo v2.x and whatever I do the thumbnails never update/refresh. And there seems to be no way to trigger this manually. Could this please get the attention it needs and be fixed? And could there please be added an item to the contextmenu of a layer to manually refresh and/or reset a thumbnail so if s*** happens again we can reset this thumbnail generation feature and have it work again? Thanks in advance (also for everybody else having these issues)!

Thanks for your quick responses. That doesn't sound very stable to say the least. I tried toggling the visibility as well as changing the layer contents, but nothing seems to update it. If this is such a common problem in Affinity it's dissapointing to see that they haven't even added a feature to refresh the thumbnail ourselves when things went wrong. But guess it is what it is atm.

As title; I have an issue with some layer thumbnails. These don't show as expected. Is there currently a way to refresh these thumbnails?

Yeah, totally recognisable. I heard once somebody say that a good artist doesn't continue working on a piece forever until it is 'perfect', but knows when it is 'good enough'. I believe that true and think that's very healthy! Keep doing what you do, you have a distinct style

That is freaking awesome!

Because there was plenty of room to make long rusted things we took for granted easier, less cluttered in the interface, more intuitive, faster and non-destructive with live preview. No software is perfect, but I'm glad they did and I think they did a great job at that!

Adding a confirmation prompt, sure, completely valid. But to remove this function would be madness for obvious reasons.

Currently there doesn't seem to be a way to execute a macro one by one on each selected layer. This makes some things overly time consuming when wanting to do this with many layers. So please add a way to execute a makro one by one on each selected layer. The menu item could be called something like 'Run Macro on Each Selected Layer (in serial)'. Example: I have a big drawing, that I now cut in pieces for cutout animation. For that I've duplicated the image layer for each part and added a mask per layer, only masking the particular part. This works, but makes Affinity super slow, even on a super powerful machine, when working on a high resolution. I therefor have created a macro that selects the mask of an image layer as selection, grows that selection by 20px, inverts that selection and than removes with that selection the pixels from the image layer it masks (the parent of the mask). I do this to have a more performant layer on a high res file, while still keeping the possibility to fine tweak masks later if needed to (hence the 20px margin). Also this makes it possible to quickly spot layers because now their thumbnails are only showing the parts it masks, instead of the full image. There are, however, many layers in this file all needing this macro to be applied, so it would be a lot easier if we could just select all layers that needs this treatment and just hit 'Run Macro on Each Selected Layer (in serial)'

This one just to add another support for the original request: to have a Linux version of the Affinity suite. This is now more relevant than ever because of geopolitics where one powerful person isn't shy nor ashamed to use Microsoft and Apple as tools for blackmail to other countries and instances and already practised this on the ICC in The Hague, The Netherlands where personel couldn't use their office accounts no more from one day to another. This means that Windows mostly, but perhaps also Apple can't be 100% trusted no more and when we can't use these OS's no more because one person feels like it, we have a huge problem. The only viable realistic option these days is Linux. So Serif, being a European company, please make a Linux version so we have a way to continue working when s*** happens.

Thanks for the quick action. I've just added to the opening post this: in Photo the Document --> Resize Document DOES work, so it looks like the issue is specific to Designer

When changing the document size in Designer (File --> Document setup) the raster images gets scaled down correctly, but their (raster-)mask layers stay the original size so don't scale with the document. Therefor all layers with a mask are messed up and need to be rescaled manually all one by one. [edit] in Photo the Document --> Resize Document DOES work, so it looks like this issue is specific to Designer

Hi @NotMyFault and @thomaso, thanks for your efforts to try to help today. I ended up doing it for this project in Affinity Photo using a raster mask because this project is working with raster graphics anyway, so that wasn't a big deal and I found out that the last time I did a similar project I did it the same way. When needing a vector mask next time I'll probably use the blend mode way @thomaso describes or just paint with a vector brush on a new layer above the image and make it a vector mask later by dragging it to the image layer to mask it. Thinking about it now, although I still believe there should be a way to just paint on a mask channel and get something like an overlay (which I understand now just isn't possible in Designer), that's not a bad workaround and not too much of extra hastle to do. And the blend mode is a nice touch to make it easer. Great tip!

Sure, I know you're not from Serif, otherwise I would've seen it in your thumbnail. But I'm not looking for a 'fix out of the box', I'm asking a question HOW TO do this. This is normal functionality that is available in pretty much all graphics software working with masks, so far from a weird question honestly. And I'm still not convinced this is not possible in Designer. The question though is how. If somebody else reading here knows; please let me know!

Thanks for your answers, I appreciate it you are trying to help. I wonder though if we are on the same wave length or having a misunderstanding. I blame that on myself for not explaining well enough. What I'm looking for is something like this: This is the viewport of Affinity Photo where you can clearly see what is masked. That is by default. Without any adjustment layers and WHILE PAINTING. Those are pixel masks though, but I need vector masks. And in Affinity Designer. I still find it hard to believe if this functionality (being able to see the image while also see what you are masking, but in a different form, like red or lighter or whatever) wouldn't be there in Affinity Designer and on vector masks.

Thanks, I know. There's also another way: to have the vectors in a layer on top of the image. But honestly, I find it hard to believe in Designer it should be needed to use workarounds for something like this: just paint a mask. Isn't there something like a 'mask view' or 'mask mode' or whatever so we can actually display the mask on top of the image with a single click, without needing to change hierarchy? I would expect such a thing on a mask layer honestly

Thanks, but that's not answering my question. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough: I need to see the image while painting (with vector brushes) the mask. While also see where the already painted mask is. So instead of only seeing the image where it should according to the mask, I also need to see the rest as how could I otherwise know where to paint the mask? So something like showing the masked parts in red on top of the image. Hope this makes more sense!

Hi, is there a way to keep seeing the image layer while painting the vector mask? Something like showing red what is masked or visa versa?

Hi @James Ritson, It's over two weeks since my post, so I would've expected a reaction by now. Could you please respond? Thanks in advance!

Awesome work! They all look superb