Pixel Brush: soft edges turns hard unexpectedly?

[Otto Manuel]

Hi,

 I have been using the symmetry features quite a bit and have stumbled upon an issue, or misunderstanding on my part that I can not figure out.

 I can start a design using a small round pixel brush and the line work will have nice soft edges that include anti aliasing, but then at some point the brush starts drawing a coarse line with coarse aliasing at the edges.

 If there is any trend I might recognize it is that this seems to occur when I am zoomed out and trying to draw long smooth lines, and then when I zoom in I notice the marked difference of the character of the line work.

 I use the B and E keystrokes often as I draw the design, but other wise the brush settings would seem to be unchanged even though the character of the resulting line work becomes remarkably different.

 A typical brush setting might be something like

width 6 - opacity 100% - flow 100% - hardness 60% -  Stabilizer ON - Window 50 - Symmetry ON - Symmetry Value = 6 - Mirror ON - Lock ON

Some how after keying back and forth between the Eraser and the Brush a few times, and zooming in and out to create long or short lines, and perhaps changing the Symmetry Value,  the brush produces a crude hard edge line.

I can't figure out how to reproduce the behavior, but it has been occurring to often for me to ignore.

What might I be doing wrong to cause this?

 

Thank you!

 

Affinity Designer 1.8.5.703 on Win 7 x64

[walt.farrell]

One key point to remember is that the Pixel Tool and the Eraser Brush Tool are both brushes, and as such their settings can interact depending on:

1. The kind of underlying brush you choose; and
2. Your chosen "brush tool sharing" option in the Assistant Manager.

My first suggestion if you're getting unwanted interaction between two brush tools would be to open the Assistant Manager (View > Assistant Manager) and turn off the brush tool sharing.

[Otto Manuel]

Hi @walt.farrell,

I had not visited the forum in the past couple weeks and just found your reply. Thank you very much for this suggestion. I will try it and see if that is what has been causing the behavior.

Thank you.

 

[walt.farrell]

You're welcome.

[Otto Manuel]

Hi,

 I tried the suggestion made above, but continued to stumble upon the unexpected behavior.

I have learned what I was doing to cause the issue, and want to share the outcome in case it helps someone in the future.

I figured out that when I was using keystrokes to switch between pixel brush, erase and zoom that I would sometimes use the "B" keystroke and instantiate the square pixel brush rather than the round brush. This is easy to see when you are working with large brush sizes, but in the instances where I was causing the confusion I was using a combination of tiny brush sizes and a distant zoom factor.

I could not see that I had mistakenly selected the square brush. I would not notice this until I zoomed back in to see the detail, and by that time I had switched from brush to zoom mode so the state of the brush option was not so obvious.

It was a very simple mistake on my part, and now I know how to recognize it, correct it, or perhaps just avoid it.

Thank you!

 

[walt.farrell]

25 minutes ago, Otto Manuel said:

I would sometimes use the "B" keystroke and instantiate the square pixel brush rather than the round brush.

Perhaps it would help if you enabled this Preference, which would prevent B from cycling through the various tools that have that shortcut:

 

[Otto Manuel]

Hi @walt.farrell,

Thanks for the suggestion. It seems like this preference selection will be especially helpful for the circumstance I have described.

Thank you!.

[walt.farrell]

You're welcome.