Pixel Tool Snapping?

[mrqwak]

Hello!

Should snapping work with the Pixel Tool? I have snap grid setup, and it works fine with the Pen Tool, but not at all with the Pixel Tool. Is this by design, or am I doing something wrong?

Thanks,

[telemax]

Hi,

You can attach a screen recording?

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, mrqwak said:

Should snapping work with the Pixel Tool?

I don't think it does, or at least I have never figured out how to make it work.

[loukash]

3 hours ago, mrqwak said:

Is this by design

Yes.
The Pixel tool is a brush. Brushes don't snap to grids.
You can use Shift to constrain a brush stroke.

[mrqwak]

28 minutes ago, loukash said:

Yes.
The Pixel tool is a brush. Brushes don't snap to grids.
You can use Shift to constrain a brush stroke.

Thanks for the clarification.

That's a pity, it would have been far more useful for it to do so. Is there absolutely no way (preference or shortcut key etc) to enable this functionality for the Pixel Tool or other brushes?

[mrqwak]

Actually, I can not even get the selection marquee thing to snap to grid! Photoshop does this no problem. It seems like a curious design choice not to have the brush or selection tool snap to grid.

[loukash]

1 minute ago, mrqwak said:

other brushes?

Vector brushes in Designer will snap to grid when edited afterwards because those are vector curves.

10 minutes ago, mrqwak said:

Is there absolutely no way

If you need precise brush-alike strokes, you can create vector strokes – which will snap to grid in Photo – and apply pressure, effects, textures etc. to them to make them look like brush strokes. I don't think that vector brushes are available in Photo though. You can, however, open an *.afphoto file in Designer and add vector brush strokes.

[loukash]

17 minutes ago, mrqwak said:

I can not even get the selection marquee thing to snap to grid!

Yeah, that's weird. I would actually also expect it to snap.

However, don't despair, when there's a will, there is a way.

1. Instead of marching ants, draw a vector rectangle/ellipse, it will snap, and you can also easily adjust it
2. Select menu > "Selection From Layer And Delete"

[loukash]

7 minutes ago, loukash said:

when there's a will, there is a way

Ah, the Pen tool will also snap to grid. So you can create free paths, then click the Selection button in the context toolbar while pen tool is active to convert the path to selection.

[mrqwak]

I'm using Affinity Photo to create graphics for 2D games. So there's a lot of tile-set work, or images where elements (e.g. sprites) are arranged in to a 16x16 or 32x32 pixel grid. 99.99% of the time I'm working on pixel layers, not shapes, or using the Pen tool etc.

So, I may want to, for example, grab a 16x16 pixel area from a pixel layer, and copy or move it to another location on the bitmap layer; source and destination locations being aligned with the 16x16 pixel grid.

Most pixel art oriented apps have no problem doing this; Gimp, Photoshop, Aesprite, Pro Motion, etc, all do this. Stunned that Affinity Photo doesn't; there really should be an option to turn this on.

[loukash]

15 minutes ago, mrqwak said:

I may want to, for example, grab a 16x16 pixel area from a pixel layer, and copy or move it to another location on the bitmap layer; source and destination locations being aligned with the 16x16 pixel grid.

You can do that:

[loukash]

Another method/workaround:

But I agree with you that it should be an option at least for the "marching ants" to snap to grid directly, without these extra steps.

[telemax]

  

[loukash]

^ That's snapping to full pixels, but not to a grid.

[mrqwak]

Thank you for your workaround suggestions loukash.

Those options do work, but they're quite cumbersome. If you're doing a lot of operations moving tiles or sprites around on a bitmap, and everything needs to be grid aligned; it's just a lot more work compared to using the Marquee Tool (assuming the devs had chosen to make it respect the snap to grid option).

I believe it's a poor design choice on part of the developers; I'd love to hear why they chose to make it this way, and if there are other considerations which factor in, that I may not be aware of.

I don't see why why they can't at least include a preference; 'marquee and pixel tool obey snap to grid' type thing.Then at least people could turn that on / off depending on their particular use case.

[loukash]

35 minutes ago, mrqwak said:

Those options do work, but they're quite cumbersome

That's what workarounds have usually in common per definition.
 

38 minutes ago, mrqwak said:

If you're doing a lot of operations moving tiles or sprites around on a bitmap, and everything needs to be grid aligned; it's just a lot more work compared to using the Marquee Tool

I understand that, but…

Another option is to figure out a completely different workflow that will get you exactly where you want to be as well.

Been there done that while moving a couple of layout projects from InDesign (CS5.5) to Publisher in the past few months.
Example: in InDesign I would use tables as predefined layout elements, and import XML to fill and auto-format them with text content. But back in the day, my use of tables was only necessary because it wasn't possible to create regular text styles to achieve the same design effect. And tables paired with XML are a p.i.t.a. in InDesign.
Publisher doesn't support XML import and auto-formatting, but its text styles – paragraph decorations in particular – are more flexible that InDesign's. So, the right solution was a workflow change: "flat" text frames without tables, content import via simple tab separated text file without XML tags, advanced paragraph formatting via text styles with keyboard shortcuts. "Flat" text frames are easier to handle than tables any time.

In Photo, if I would have to snap to pixels all the time, I would split all elements into separate layers. Those are handled smartly and are always being snapped to grid – if active – when moved with the Move tool.

54 minutes ago, mrqwak said:

I believe it's a poor design choice on part of the developers

Some parts of the UI are considerably bad, agreed. Others are just different.

The key to a successful Affinity transition is also getting rid of what I call the Schmadobe Mindset™. We've all been brainwashed, me for two decades. (Particularly after Adobe took my beloved Freehand from me. Bastards!)
Sometimes it's a Good Thing® to let loose and start anew.

[mrqwak]

On 3/22/2021 at 5:09 PM, loukash said:

Sometimes it's a Good Thing® to let loose and start anew.

Hmm thanks, but I'm struggling to see how it's good when the alternatives new ways are all more cumbersome!

I'm becoming resigned to the fact that, while very pretty, and almost certainly great for some forms of digital art; AP is next to useless for game pixel art (compared with say, something like Aseprite). Sadly, it's only a handful of things that let it down, which I'm sure could be easily rectified; but it's just falling on deaf ears, dev team doesn't seem at all interested.

[R C-R]

51 minutes ago, mrqwak said:

Sadly, it's only a handful of things that let it down, which I'm sure could be easily rectified; but it's just falling on deaf ears, dev team doesn't seem at all interested.

Not true. First, a lot of things that might seem easy to add may in fact be very difficult to implement 'under the hood' because they could require rewriting a lot of code to eliminate conflicts with existing features & to eliminate bugs the new code creates.

EDIT: as it is, they seem to have introduced a lot of bugs in the most recent updates, so I hope for now they concentrate on fixing them before they consider adding any new features.

But more to the point, there are dozens if not hundreds of features requested by various users & relatively few developers to try to sort out which ones to concentrate on.