Snapping brush strokes to guides, vectors etc.

[rhinorrhea]

Hello there!

I'd like to preface this with saying that I'm a seasoned GIMP user, so I can't help comparing Affinity Photo to GIMP. I haven't spent much time with Affinity Photo, but just enough to compare some of the more basic features to those found in GIMP.

I've recently decided to give the Affinity Photo trial a go and I liked it a lot! I found that it has some features that GIMP either doesn't have at all, or only has rudimentary support for. I also like the general workflow, it's pretty "clean". I purchased a license today and started tinkering with it some more. I drew a vector shape and tried to draw some brush strokes along its outline. However, it seems that snapping brushes to vectors isn't possible, unless there's something I don't understand. I made sure all my snapping settings were correct, I looked in the help, I googled a bit and found e.g. this thread. Specifically, this post claims that:

Quote

The brushes in Affinity Photo are raster based. They are not attached to any vector path and thus don't snap to the grid/guides etc.

I don't see how brushes being raster-based serves as an explanation as to why they don't snap to vector paths or... grid/guides?! Okay, this last part got me surprised. I dragged some guides onto my canvas and indeed, I couldn't draw brush strokes along them. To elaborate, I do realize that brushes are raster-based, and the items I'm trying to snap to are vector-based, but GIMP (while having rather primitive vector path functionality) allows me to do just that, and I wouldn't even have thought that something as basic as snapping to guides or grids could be a problem, as it's a normal thing there. I'm not convinced by the vector-raster discrepancy, as I'm simply trying to aid myself in drawing precisely, and if it isn't a problem for GIMP, I don't see how it's a problem for Affinity Photo. I do realize this would require quantizing/approximating the path to nearest pixels, which might not be as simple mathematically (edit: wait, it's already there, after all vector shapes can be rendered, so why can't they be snapped to?) and might result in some minor performance overhead, but user experience-wise, this seems like a basic feature.

Is there something basic I'm missing or does Affinity Photo really not support drawing along a guide or a vector object? If so, are there plans for adding such support? It might not be a deal breaker for me, but I think I'll go sans-Serif for more serious projects for now and resort to GIMP, which I'm most comfortable with. I hoped Affinity Photo could replace GIMP for me, but it's not there yet. I haven't made a thorough feature comparison and don't know what else is missing from the workflow I'm used to, but it has a lot of stuff that I really like, so I hope it grows to be my favorite design/editing software.

Cheers!

Edited April 5, 2020 by rhinorrhea

[GarryP]

Welcome to the forums.
I think you may need Designer, rather than Photo, to do what you want.
However, you can draw straight lines with the Paint Brush Tool by clicking rather than dragging (although I don’t think you can snap to anything while doing this).
Someone who does more of this sort of work may be able to help you further.

[firstdefence]

I think the application of a raster brush to a stroke is what you are after, which Affinity Photo doesn’t do. but as GarryP has alluded to, Affinity Designer is the app you really want as this will apply a vector brush (Raster image (PNG) applied to a curve (path)) Affinity Photo has a brush icon for curves (paths) but this is a “silent" option that is used for when you edit an afdesigner file in photo so that it retains the edibility of the curve with the vector brush applied.

Trial Affinity Designer and you will see what we mean. (approx £50 for both is a steal at the moment to be honest)