Fill layers and tiling

[wdmartin]

Hi! I make maps for use in games of Dungeons and Dragons. Here's a recent example of the kind of thing I do.

In Photoshop, I make heavy use of a library full of seamless texture images.  They're raster images, not vector, mostly from textures.com.  My workflow involves flood-filling layers with these repeating images, then masking them, blending in other textures, and so on to create the scene I want.

I'm trying out Photo Affinity, because Photoshop CS6 is really showing its age, but I hate Adobe's subscription model.

First, I got one of my patterns out of Photoshop.  Here it is.

A nice rough floor of wood planks.  This is 256x256.

Next, I created a blank document in Affinity Photo: 2000x2000px.  Okay so far.  I created a blank layer because it doesn't do that automatically, and added a pink 100px grid with 10-pixel subdivisions, as these are the measurements I use most often.

The Flood Fill tool doesn't seem to have a Bitmap option, but Google informed me that the Gradient tool does.  Odd, but okay.  I clicked Gradient, chose Type: Bitmap, and selected my file.  The result was something like this:

Hrm. Okay.  I grabbed the little white thing and dragged it around a bit, and discovered that by fiddling with the handles I could make the actual texture appear and resize/rotate it arbitrarily.  It doesn't wrap, though.

So I zapped that layer and did more googling.

Attempt 2 was to go to Layer > New Fill Layer, then select Type > Bitmap on the resulting layer and select my image.  Which yielded:

I fiddled with the Extend settings a bit, before realizing that they don't actually do anything significant if you haven't moved and resized the fill.  After moving it and resizing it so I could actually see the pattern, I determined that the Extend: Wrap setting does more or less what I want.  Mostly.  Here it is:

The pattern repeats across the whole of the image.  I think it's at its native size, but I'm not really sure.  I had to eyeball how far to move the handles on the Fill in order to hit 256px, and I may be off by a few.

Is there really no way to just fill a layer with an existing seamless raster-based pattern without manually scaling and positioning it?  Or have I just failed to find it?

Next up -- I need to learn how Affinity handles masks and blending, because those are hugely important.  But just now I'm going to bed, because the above took nearly 2 hours to figure out and it's late.  I want to like Affinity, but the difficulty of accomplishing this very basic task is somewhat off-putting.

[GarryP]

Welcome to the forums @wdmartin

You can look at these two threads to get some answers (I just created the second one so probably not many answers in it at time of writing):
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/109074-ade-fill-tool-bitmap-fills/
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/128219-should-the-wrapping-bitmap-fill-taking-original-aspect-of-layer-into-consideration/
Basically, from the answers in the first thread, I don’t think you can do what you want, but I could be wrong.

[wdmartin]

Thanks! I rather like this forum software, as an aside.  It's pretty slick.

I'll continue my experiments.  It would be nice to be on something a little more modern than CS6.  For one thing, Affinity Photo performs a whole lot faster.