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Designer crashes when using the pencil tool


Suvi

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I am running Affinity Designer 1.8.3 on a Mac OS 10.12 (Sierra).  I am creating simple illustrations drawing with the pencil tool on top of a photograph.  With the pencil tool, I like to use the stabilizer to make my lines smoother.  As I am drawing, the program crashes on me regularly.  I am having to save after every line or shape that I draw to avoid loosing my work.  Sometimes I am able to work for 20 minutes without a crash, sometimes it crashes immediately upon opening my document or after I draw one line.  Any advice on how get a more stable environment?

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Welcome to the forums Suvi,

I don't have problems like that on the MacBook with OS 10.12.6. Off the top of my head I have to ask the question how much free space does your hard drive on the computer have? Too little space will cause problems because low memory (RAM) means the program must write changes to swap files which are located on the computer's hard drive.

So, how much RAM do you have, how much free space do you have on your computer's hard drive. And how large is the file you are working on.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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I have 100Gb free on a 500Gb drive.  I have had this happen on several different files, anywhere from 3-11Mb in size.  I had thought that the amount of ram might be the issue too and even restarted my MacBook Pro to see if that would help, to no avail.

Edited by Suvi
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8 hours ago, Suvi said:

As I am drawing, the program crashes on me regularly.  I am having to save after every line or shape that I draw to avoid loosing my work.

Can you draw with the pencil with the stabilizer off?

Couple of  more questions, where are you saving your work is it the computer's hard drive or the cloud, or a networked drive? And do you have an external monitor hooked up? I have no problem using the stabilizer while drawing.

I save to the internal hard drive and do not have an external hard drive.

There is a thing called Clear User Data you do this by holding down the Control key on your Mac while starting up the program then clearing the user settings. The default is the top three items. This will sometimes help. The final option is to delete the application from your computer (just move the application from the Applications folder to the trash) and re download from whichever store you purchased it from.

And finally I only just noticed this is in the Publisher forum so perhaps a moderator can move it to the Designer forum.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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28 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

Can you draw with the pencil with the stabilizer off?

It still crashes when this happens.  I tested that early on to see if the stabilizer was the issue.  I first noticed the problem when I was using an alternate pressure on my brush stroke to change the taper of the lines that I drew.  However, since the crashing started, now I am drawing with a basic pencil with solid line and it still crashes.

28 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

Couple of  more questions, where are you saving your work is it the computer's hard drive or the cloud, or a networked drive? And do you have an external monitor hooked up? I have no problem using the stabilizer while drawing.

I save to the internal hard drive and do not have an external hard drive.

No external monitor or hard drive connected.  I am saving directly to the computer's hard drive.  It is an mid-2014 MacBook Pro.

28 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

There is a thing called Clear User Data you do this by holding down the Control key on your Mac while starting up the program then clearing the user settings. The default is the top three items. This will sometimes help.

I am unsure how to do this.  When I hold down control, the program starts up like normal.  There is no option to "clear user data". 

28 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

The final option is to delete the application from your computer (just move the application from the Applications folder to the trash) and re download from whichever store you purchased it from.

I actually tried downloading an older version of the program (1.8.2) and it still had the same issue.  I did not delete the other application (1.8.3) but the bug exists on both versions.

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2 minutes ago, Suvi said:

I am unsure how to do this.  When I hold down control, the program starts up like normal.  There is no option to "clear user data". 

First thing hold down the control key then use the mouse to double click the App's icon, continue to hold the control key down until you see the screen 

1143890157_ScreenShot2020-04-19at11_06_41AM.png.877a1599346fdf86c97aace3aaf4f495.png

5 minutes ago, Suvi said:

I actually tried downloading an older version of the program (1.8.2) and it still had the same issue.  I did not delete the other application (1.8.3) but the bug exists on both versions.

In my experience I have weird problems with more than one version of an application present in the Applications folder. Nothing at all like this though. 

It is a Sunday so there are fewer people from Serif/Affinity about but if you could find one of the crash reports to post here it may help them when they finally do notice this.

Go to the Utilities folder in the Applications folder and find the Console application. Start that and then choose the User Reports, look through the list for Affinity Designer and the date of the most recent crash (in the image below I have highlighted a Photo crash). Then you can use Command + R to show the file in a finder window. Just drag that over to your browser window and it will be added to your reply.

1545583749_ScreenShot2020-04-19at11_14_10AM.thumb.png.796f36f253241ecb24a708425be75ea2.png

Even if things clear up I would suggest including the crash report and then the people from Affinity can use it or not.

 

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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18 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

First thing hold down the control key then use the mouse to double click the App's icon, continue to hold the control key down until you see the screen 

I tried it again, and it worked this time.  Thanks.  I cleared user defaults.  Hopefully that helps.

Quote

In my experience I have weird problems with more than one version of an application present in the Applications folder. Nothing at all like this though. 

If the above doesn't solve the problem, I will try deleting all versions of Designer and downloading a new copy.  Thanks for the clarification.

Quote

Even if things clear up I would suggest including the crash report and then the people from Affinity can use it or not.

I will attach a crash report.  Hopefully it helps the programmers fix this issue in a future build, if it is not due to my user error somehow. 

 

Thank you for your help so far.  I really appreciate it!

 

 

Affinity Designer_2020-04-19-201530_Grooviness.crash

Edited by Suvi
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4 hours ago, Jon P said:

@Suvi Can you just confirm for me if you get this only in your current document, or if you start a new one and just start drawing?

It happens on new documents too.  I can usually draw for about 45 minutes or so on a brand new document before the first crash.  Then they will come in random frequency of 30 seconds to 45 minutes after reopening.

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9 hours ago, Stephen Elliott said:

I am having the exact same problem on a 2019 macbook pro. Did you figure out how to fix it?

No, no fix so far.  I just save after every line I draw to prevent loosing any data.  I tried everything suggested above but it didn't solve the issue.

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UPDATE: One thing that helped me was to go to my Utilities and click on Activity Monitor. I found a lot of tasks running in the background from programs I had previously opened (I also noticed that Chrome was eating up a lot of memory) and I closed out anything that wasn't essential (I had to Google a few things to figure out their function, because I am NOT the most tech-savy person). I found that I was running near my RAM limit (I have 8GB) when running Designer and Chrome + those miscelaneous tasks. I worked for about 1/2 hour without any problems after shutting it down to the point that I was only using about 1/2 my RAM (4GB). Didn't have any more time yesterday/today because art is my part-time gig, but I'll update if I the problem doesn't come up for a few days.

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  • Staff

Hi Suvi,

Are you able to attach a document that you're seeing this in frequently along with just a bit of information on how you're drawing that caused it to crash? For example does it still crash in this document if you draw with Stabiliser off, or is it just when using Stabiliser?

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On 4/23/2020 at 12:17 AM, Stephen Elliott said:

UPDATE: One thing that helped me was to go to my Utilities and click on Activity Monitor. I found a lot of tasks running in the background from programs I had previously opened (I also noticed that Chrome was eating up a lot of memory) and I closed out anything that wasn't essential 

I wish this would help, but since it started, I have been running Affinity with no other applications open.  It still crashes a lot.  :-(

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19 hours ago, Sean P said:

Are you able to attach a document that you're seeing this in frequently along with just a bit of information on how you're drawing that caused it to crash? For example does it still crash in this document if you draw with Stabiliser off, or is it just when using Stabiliser?

gyoza.afdesign  Here is a document that crashed a lot as I was creating it.  I was tracing over a photograph using the pencil, predominantly with the stabilizer on with a distance of 22px, which caused it to crash.  I tried with the stabilizer off and it still crashed but not as frequently (meaning I was able to draw for longer, but it still would crash eventually).  Typically with the stabilizer on, I was able to draw for 30-60 minutes before the first crash, then it would crash after that at a random frequency anywhere from 30 seconds to 45 minutes since the last crash.  I would simply select the pen and begin drawing a line and the program would crash.  I worked on one diagram at a time, though all 3 images were "placed" in the beginning.  I have other documents with just one photo where this happened too (but they are larger because of colors and pixel layers added to the document).  Other manipulations to the document do not cause it to crash.

gyoza2.afdesign

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  • 1 month later...

Any update on this issue? I have been trying out Affinity to make the switch from adobe but so far I can't even trace over a simple image without it crashing. I'm just using the basic pen tool with a simple color and drawing one long line. Sometimes I can draw for a pretty long while and then it crashes and sometimes it just immediately crashes. This is not very hopeful to make the switch...

I'm using affinity 1.8.3 (the latest trial version) on a late 2013 iMac with 8gb ram running Mac OS 10.15.5

Edited by Ubie
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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...

I am also facing crash issues with the Pencil Tool. Oddly, it has so far only been a problem with a single document, which is just a single JPEG image layer and many pencil strokes. I have had three crashes in a short time so far, usually right in the middle of drawing. They all crash in the dispatch queue, with the same stack trace, so I'm only going to attach one crash log:

Affinity Designer_2020-07-26-101045_thor-hackintosh.crash

This seems to be the guilty thread, at least in my case:

Thread 6 Crashed:: Dispatch queue: com.apple.root.default-qos
0   liblibpersona.dylib               0x000000012f8fe8d1 StructureCommandHelper::~StructureCommandHelper() + 145
1   liblibpersona.dylib               0x000000012f8ea05e AddChildNodesCommand::~AddChildNodesCommand() + 1086
2   liblibpersona.dylib               0x000000012f8eaf5f virtual thunk to AddChildNodesCommand::~AddChildNodesCommand() + 31
3   liblibpersona.dylib               0x000000011e26e5c7 CompoundCommand::~CompoundCommand() + 119
4   liblibpersona.dylib               0x000000011e26df23 virtual thunk to PreviewCommand::~PreviewCommand() + 35
5   liblibpersona.dylib               0x0000000130b6abf6 DocumentController::ProcessCommandQueue() + 5958
6   liblibkernel.dylib                0x00000001114e413c invocation function for block in Kernel::Dispatch::DispatchAndForget(void (*)(void*), void*, Kernel::Dispatch::DispatchPriority) + 92
7   libdispatch.dylib                 0x00007fff5e1685f8 _dispatch_call_block_and_release + 12
8   libdispatch.dylib                 0x00007fff5e16963d _dispatch_client_callout + 8
9   libdispatch.dylib                 0x00007fff5e16ba53 _dispatch_queue_override_invoke + 763
10  libdispatch.dylib                 0x00007fff5e1773bc _dispatch_root_queue_drain + 324
11  libdispatch.dylib                 0x00007fff5e177b46 _dispatch_worker_thread2 + 90
12  libsystem_pthread.dylib           0x00007fff5e3a96b3 _pthread_wqthread + 583
13  libsystem_pthread.dylib           0x00007fff5e3a93fd start_wqthread + 13

It looks to be an invalid access when adding a child node to a path. My guess is that you're trying to dereference an invalid pointer when accessing a member on an object. Why this doesn't always occur is more of a mystery. For me, it only began happening with one specific document that I created by opening a JPEG file. I could attach the document, which, while amusing, is probably not appropriate for this forum. 😆

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@Sean P Oh! It crashed again, but this time it did it while attempting to select a node with the Node Tool after using the Pencil Tool for a while... I'm guessing this might be a new bug? Amusingly, one no less annoying than the original bug...

Thread 0 Crashed:: Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
0   liblibpersona.dylib               0x000000011df30d66 Kernel::JailCounted<MasterPageInstanceNode> const Kernel::TreeBaseNDJailCounted<Node, 5, NodeChildListType>::GetFirstChildOfType<MasterPageInstanceNode>(NodeChildListType) const + 262
1   liblibpersona.dylib               0x0000000132208b59 SpreadNode::FindFirstAppliedMaster(int) const + 41
2   liblibpersona.dylib               0x0000000132209818 SpreadNode::GetSnappingGrid() const + 56
3   liblibpersona.dylib               0x0000000132209935 non-virtual thunk to SpreadNode::GetSnappingGrid() const + 21
4   liblibpersona.dylib               0x0000000134960a4f SnappingTool::SnappingData::CreateSnappingResult(Tool const&) + 95
5   liblibpersona.dylib               0x0000000128f29d66 (anonymous namespace)::HandleCurve::SetSnappedStartPoint(HandleTool&, ToolPointSpread const&) + 614
6   liblibpersona.dylib               0x000000011fefca39 HandleTool::UpdateHoverHandle() + 537
7   liblibpersona.dylib               0x000000011feff85a HandleTool::OnMouseMove(ToolPointSpread const&) + 138
8   liblibpersona.dylib               0x000000011e0371b2 Tool::MouseMovedSpreadCoords(ToolPointSpread const&) + 546
9   liblibpersona.dylib               0x000000011e0353d4 Tool::MouseMoved(ToolPointView const&) + 148
10  com.seriflabs.libcocoaui          0x000000010d1db107 -[DocumentView mouseMoved:] + 615
11  com.apple.AppKit                  0x00007fff2fa51f28 -[NSTrackingArea mouseMoved:] + 151
12  com.apple.AppKit                  0x00007fff2f98ab25 -[NSWindow(NSEventRouting) _reallySendEvent:isDelayedEvent:] + 4726
13  com.apple.AppKit                  0x00007fff2f989667 -[NSWindow(NSEventRouting) sendEvent:] + 478
14  com.seriflabs.libcocoaui          0x000000010d0a4c56 -[PersonaWindow sendEvent:] + 1606
15  com.apple.AppKit                  0x00007fff2f829994 -[NSApplication(NSEvent) sendEvent:] + 3220
16  com.seriflabs.libcocoaui          0x000000010d0d9834 -[Application sendEvent:] + 756
17  com.apple.AppKit                  0x00007fff2f8175c0 -[NSApplication run] + 755
18  com.apple.AppKit                  0x00007fff2f806ac8 NSApplicationMain + 777
19  com.seriflabs.affinitydesigner.beta    0x000000010baf5464 0x10baf3000 + 9316

Full crash log attached below.

Affinity Designer Beta_2020-07-26-202250_thor-hackintosh.crash

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