Brushes Disappearing

[VAS101]

Hey! So I recently updated my Affinity Designer program on my laptop and I noticed there were some brushes missing from the pixel persona. I've searched all over the web for these brushes and I can't seem to find it. I could really use some help in finding this specific brush since it tailors to a project I'm doing. 

 

Heres a picture of the brush I used to make a background. Hope to hear back soon.

[firstdefence]

Did you install the brushes or were they already installed as part of Affinity Designer?

[VAS101]

They were already installed as part of Affinity Designer

[Patrick Connor]

They were removed on purpose, however as some customers are missing them they will shortly be made available as a free download to optionally add those previously available stock brushes back in to the old categories. Please watch AffinitySpotlight.com over the coming days for a new article "Get legacy Affinity brushes" which will contain a link to these brush downloads

[firstdefence]

Ive just looked in my backup folder and I have some of the brush sets from 1.7.3  The ones I can't see in 1.8 are Chalks and Pastels and Grunge.

...and I think Oils and acrylics are not there.

Grunge.afbrushes

Chalks_and_Pastels.afbrushes

Oils and Acrylics.afbrushes

[VAS101]

Thanks for the help! I'll be sure to check and thanks for the downloads.

[firstdefence]

No Problem 👍

[R C-R]

4 hours ago, Patrick Connor said:

They were removed on purpose...

Am I the only one who thinks that, intended or not, this (unannounced & undocumented?) change has made a bad situation even worse?

ATM, I have 27 different categories in the AD Designer persona, some with just one or two brushes in them in categories with the old names (like Chalks and Pastels). I found out from some staff member this is because I had saved one or more custom variations of some brushes in the old category & the update preserved them by automatically adding the old category with just those brushes in them.

That would fine if A) we had some warning about this before updating the app & B) we had a comprehensive 'brush manager' of some sort that let us see all the brushes in every category at the same time (like maybe in a hierarchal view similar to Finder's list view) and a way to compare & move brushes between categories or delete them; and a way to reorder the categories in the Brushes panel.

Even before this change, trying to manage brushes & categories was a nightmare. Now, even when the legacy brushes become available for download, it will take a lot of time & effort to organize them into anything resembling the pre-update order.

[walt.farrell]

17 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Am I the only one who thinks that, intended or not, this (unannounced & undocumented?) change has made a bad situation even worse?

I'm not sure I'd say it made a bad situation worse, but it doesn't seem like the right way to do business. And it's not the first time this has happened. It happened for 1.7, too, with the removal of some 1.6 brushes. And Serif staff then made them available for download when requested.

As I recall, users of the 1.8 Mac beta for Designer were warned (in the release notes for the beta release just before RC1, I think) that the brushes had been reworked and restructured, and they should save their brushes before install if they were worried. I don't think the notes said anything specifically about removing any brushes, though.

At that time, as a Windows user, I thought several things:

1. I wonder if that's happening to the Windows version, too. Probably it will, as they'd want compatible brushes. Maybe I'd better backup my brushes, too.
   (As it turned out, yes, it happened in Windows, too. But no, they didn't warn the Windows beta users. The fact that (as far as I know) this change happened in (or after?) what turned out to be the last beta release was part of the reason I didn't think the production release would happen quite as soon as it did.)
    
2. I wonder if Serif remembers how upset some users were when 1.7 deleted their favorite brushes. Surely they would have learned from that, and wouldn't summarily remove any brushes again.
   (No, apparently the prior experience didn't matter.)
    
3. I wonder how they'll warn users of the Mac and Microsoft Stores to backup their brushes before the auto-update happens. Or users who purchased from Serif, even, when their applications say "hey, there's an update available".

I'm sure the reworked brushes are better in some technical and artistic ways, and I have no idea why some were simply deleted. Perhaps Serif didn't want to make those improvements to all the old brushes?

But users become attached to the brushes they've been using, and don't like them disappearing. I'm glad that Serif will make downloads available for the brushes that were deleted, but it's a disruption that can't make users happy.

[R C-R]

9 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

But users become attached to the brushes they've been using, and don't like them disappearing.

For me, it is not just that but also that I spent considerable time setting up the order of the categories & the brushes in them as I wanted, so anything that disrupts that is annoying.

[R C-R]

10 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

As I recall, users of the 1.8 Mac beta for Designer were warned (in the release notes for the beta release just before RC1, I think) that the brushes had been reworked and restructured, and they should save their brushes before install if they were worried. I don't think the notes said anything specifically about removing any brushes, though.

I did see something about saving the brushes in the beta notes. Of course, that in itself is a chore if one has a lot of brush categories because each one has to be exported individually.

Worse, for those of us with all 3 apps there can be five sets of brush categories (3 raster & 2 vector), each with a different mix of categories & brushes, that need to be exported. Moreover, some categories & some of the brushes in them may have been given custom names, so for those of us that have tried to be diligent about exporting our brush categories whenever we have made significant changes to them, it is possible to end up with dozens of exported & saved categories, with no simple way to tell what each of them contains, other than by importing them & trying to compare them to whatever is already in the app.

On top of that, there is no way to tell if an exported category contains vector or raster brushes other than by importing it, so among the other aggravations it is possible to import many MB's of vector brushes into AP by mistake.

[walt.farrell]

13 minutes ago, R C-R said:

On top of that, there is no way to tell if an exported category contains vector or raster brushes other than by importing it, so among the other aggravations it is possible to import many MB's of vector brushes into AP by mistake.

Suggestion: when you're exporting a brush category, put "raster" or "vector" somewhere in the file name or directory name. That's what I do, and it saves confusion.

[R C-R]

46 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Suggestion: when you're exporting a brush category, put "raster" or "vector" somewhere in the file name or directory name. That's what I do, and it saves confusion.

What I have done is to create two folders, one named " Pixel Brushes" for raster & another named " Vector Brushes" for vector brush category exports, in a parent "Brushes" folder. But that by itself does not tell me which Affinity app that category was exported from or if I import that category into any of them if it would duplicate in whole or in part the brushes in a category that already exists in that app.

I have tried various things to help with that but since (among other things) I may have changed some category or brush names, or reordered some of their brushes, it still is a nearly indecipherable mess. Considering all the .afbrushes files I have saved to this "Brushes" folder, including backups of those I have bought & those available as free updates or from other users, I have around 200 of these files in that folder that together use about 2.75GB of file space. I know some are redundant copies or nearly so, but it is very difficult to determine which of them are & which are not, short of importing each of them into one of the apps & comparing them to the others already there.

This is why I think we need a 'brush manager' of some kind. It won't solve everything but it would be a step in the right direction.

[Cecil]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

This is why I think we need a 'brush manager' of some kind. It won't solve everything but it would be a step in the right direction.

I agree 100%.  Thank you for addressing in detail your method and problems managing brush files.