layers with height/depth channel

[kirk23]

Working in texture area I could say an image editor that just make rgb pictures  is not enough for what I do.    

  Still I mostly hate all those modern texture editors : Substance .Mari etc. and would love something easy, elegant and simple like Affinity photo.       Would it just support a height/depth  channel in addition to regular  RGBA    and a  depth combining blending method ( basically  Max  of layerA and B - layerA )   and also would  do "inpaint"  on RGB and Depth in sync  it would be perfectly enough.

Like old good  Corel PAinter  which always had this hidden treasure ( depth channel) even before it became Corel one,   but for some weird  reason never turned it into something even remotely usable.  To extract it from painter files you had to do it with some obscure Blender addon .

I don't need any fancy normal map/roughness/whatever extra channels  . all of them are easily  derivative from depth.

 

BTW,  the depth is getting a part of traditional  mass photo editing workflow too with all those phone camera novelties ,   time of flight, parallax cam  etc.      I think  Affinity Photo could be ahead of Adobe in that regard with  depth channel support if would catch the trend in time.

Besides the depth channel would allow to make some fancy "impasto" strokes  like Rebelle and Artrage. The later even allows to export depth but only as 8 bit picture , pretty unusable too.

 

 

[John Rostron]

On 12/11/2019 at 2:20 AM, kirk23 said:

a  depth combining blending method ( basically  Max  of layerA and B - layerA ) 

Could you not get this by using Apply Image?

John

[kirk23]

On 12/12/2019 at 10:18 PM, John Rostron said:

Could you not get this by using Apply Image?

John

I can't.   It should be dynamically updating blending + dynamically updating mask.  If "apply image" would be live effect  it might work with a stack of 2-3 of them.      Still it would be  convoluted and complicated mess to manage.    Slightly improved Corel Painter/Artrage style   would be much simpler to work with.

Another example "Quixel mixer" that  recently  became free soft.  It has probably best depth blending.   It's simple math really  so why couldn't it be in every  image editor .

[IPv6]

4 hours ago, kirk23 said:

I can't.   It should be dynamically updating blending + dynamically updating mask.  If "apply image" would be live effect  it might work with a stack of 2-3 of them.      Still it would be  convoluted and complicated mess to manage.    Slightly improved Corel Painter/Artrage style   would be much simpler to work with.

Another example "Quixel mixer" that  recently  became free soft.  It has probably best depth blending.   It's simple math really  so why couldn't it be in every  image editor .

Working with heightmaps is not a common thing to do, unfortunately. As well as normal maps, etc. There is dedicated soft for it, though

But if Live procedural filter will get "layer sampling" at some point in future - such things would be a breeze... and many more
 

[kirk23]

In my humble opinion all that dedicated  soft is monstrously inconvenient and artist unfriendly.    Guess it's because devs who design it and suggest features are "technical" artists at core.    Never studying for an art degree or something.    Those people think differently   and the soft rather reflect it.      

On the  other hand soft like Rebelle or Painter is so focused on recreating traditional medias experience  they totally forget there is a bigger market where such techniques could find a good use.   

Thus Painter even don't let you export depth channel.   It's totally  crazy thing.      

      I like how simple and elegant  Affinity soft is   without all those endless puzzles  I have to solve in Substance designer   spending more time on planning and debugging my node network rather than creative process  itself.       Procedural filter looks promising indeed but perhaps it might be just Substance sbsar files working as live filters or  Filter forge plugin being live on layers.