Many of my raster brushes have disappeared from Designer

[mojoxrisen]

I have many purchased raster brushes loaded in Designer.  I noticed today when I move into pixel persona that many of my raster brushes are missing?  Any thoughts on how to fix this?

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums.

Usually they're missing because someone is looking for raster brushes in the Designer Persona, so your case seems uncommon.

Question: Where did you purchase the brushes, and how did you install them? Just as a guess, for example, if you purchased from the Affinity Store, and installed via the new My Account feature, then if you decided to Sign Out, you have a choice of whether those brushes remain available or not.

[mojoxrisen]

The brushes that I purchased through the Affinity store are mostly there (I haven't verified every one of them but they all seem to be there).  The other brushes I purchased through Retro Supply, Frankentoon and other brush and asset makers. 

While not all of those brushes are missing, many are.   I installed them by dragging and dropping the brush file into designer.  They have all been installed for at least a month, without a problem, until yesterday.

[walt.farrell]

Thanks. No idea right now why some would be there and others not. Sorry.

[Dan C]

Hi @mojoxrisen,

Welcome to the Affinity Forums

We're certainly very sorry to hear this - the Affinity apps have no way to selectively remove brushes, and if your application data had become corrupted I would have expected all brushes to be missing from the app.

Can you please confirm for me, have you recently;

installed any new third party applications?

made any changes to your computer (both hardware and software wise)?

ran an antivirus scan?

Do you run any 'cleaning' applications, such as CCleaner?

Many thanks in advance!

[mojoxrisen]

Thanks for your response.

 

I haven't installed any third party applications or made any changes to hardware.  I also do not have CCleaner installed on my computer. 

[Dan C]

Many thanks for confirming that for me and my apologies for the delayed response here!

Can you please open Windows Run (Windows Key + R) then paste the following string and press OK:

%appdata%\Affinity\Designer\1.0\user

In the window that opens, please select the assets.propcol file, then upload this to your reply here.

Now, navigate to the Run dialog once more and paste the following -

%ProgramFiles%\Affinity\Designer\Resources\Affinity Designer\

In this window, you should see another assets.propcol file, please copy this to your desktop and rename it to assets1.propcol, then also attach this here for me.

Many thanks in advance!

[mojoxrisen]

Here are the files that you have requested.

 

[Dan C]

Many thanks for the files provided @mojoxrisen! 

I'm not quite sure how I've managed this, but it appears as though I've requested the Assets file from yourself, when I should have requested the raster_brushes.propcol file from both locations - my sincerest apologies for the mistake 

Could you please repeat this process for me, but this time attach the raster_brushes files? Many thanks!

[mojoxrisen]

Here are the raster brush files

raster_brushes.propcol raster_brushes1.propcol

[Dan C]

Many thanks for these files also! I can see that there are a few custom Brush categories still here - however some of these categories appear to be completely empty which I've not seen before.

Are you missing full categories, or is it the issue I have seen with empty categories that you are reporting please?

[mojoxrisen]

Yes, I am missing full categories of brushes.  I had a very large amount of brushes installed.  Could this have caused an issue?

[Dan C]

Thanks for letting me know - I've passed your files through to our developers to be investigated further, though it is somewhat unlikely that we'll be able to recover these lost brushes, as I'm still not entirely sure what caused this for you.

On 7/15/2021 at 6:42 PM, mojoxrisen said:

I had a very large amount of brushes installed.  Could this have caused an issue?

There is no limit to the number of custom brushes you can have installed and this certainly should not cause any issues within Affinity, especially with missing data.

I'm currently discussing this issue further with the team here, to see if there are other variables to check, as you have already confirmed no hardware/software changes recently. As soon as I have further questions/steps to try here, I'll be sure to reply

[Dan C]

@mojoxrisen, for our developers clarification, could you please confirm the following for me?

• Are you using Windows or mac? (I realise today I provided file locations for Windows, but I never actually confirmed this with yourself - my apologies!)
   
• What version number of Affinity are you currently using? (and/or were using when this issue occurred?) This can be found through Help > About on Windows (or Affinity Designer > About) on mac.
   
• Were any of the brushes you lost custom brushes? Or are you able to reinstall these brushes from the files you've previously downloaded?
  I appreciate you may be reporting this to better understand why it happened, simply we'd like to know if we're looking to try and recover data here, or just to hypothesize a cause?

Many thanks once again