Image Vector Brush - non-stretch mode

[Alex W]

Why:

Vector brushes are great, but can be quite frustrating when using them for certain purposes, especially vector image brushes. Quite often you will have a nice image that you want to draw along the path, set up just how you want it... then Affinity goes and stretches it.

This is particularly an issue when you are creating brushes that represent real things, like walls, or cliffs. You want a decent amount of variation and so need a decent length image to do so.

It's fine if you are doing really long paths where the repeat is numerous and the stretch can be spread out, or have lines that are very close to exact multiples of your image, but other than that you will find your paths just look totally different, which is often not at all what you want, and when you have short paths, squeezing one whole repetition of the image in to the path can look really wrong/ugly.

What:

The ability to set a vector brush to just repeat the image and cut off at whatever point along the image the path happens to end (ie. to not stretch the image at all) would be a really helpful addition. Granted this would mean that closed path ends would not meet seamlessly, but that is a trade off that is perfectly acceptable for the benefit of consistent image representation and not relevant in all use cases. Maybe another option could even allow it to be set to stretch only if closed.

Image attached for clarity.

Lastly I did search for similar posts, but apologies if this has come up already.

 

[Alex W]

It'd also be really nice if it could be set so that for sharp corners the image isn't stretched across the entire length of a segment when using stretch or fold (is there really any difference between these?), and instead was stretched only as far back as needed to wrap around the corner. At the moment you an resolve it by adding extra control points in, but for a lot of image based brushes like the one above you just don't want to hap pen and it can get tedious fixing it (not to mention you have to re-fix it every time you merge curves, because the ones you have added get removed).

[Alex W]

To add to the corner issue above, this is even more frustrating if you are working with compound curves, because you actually can't add the extra control points to your shapes (or rather you can, but the rendering of the stroke on the compound path will just ignore them) meaning you are forced to destructively convert the compound path to curves, and then add your control points.

It's not.... great.