Patterns and surfaces in Affinity Designer

[Furry]

Is there any equivalent in Designer to Illustrator’s Effects Gallery? I am wanting, in particular, to achieve a grain surface or a sandstone surface. When I search the web for answers, most of the sites listed by Google seem to be about five years old and they say it is not possible. But I am aware there have been a lot of changes and improvements in Affinity Designer in that time.

[PixelPest]

7 hours ago, Furry said:

Is there any equivalent in Designer to Illustrator’s Effects Gallery?

Not afaik, though you can have noise in your fill color:

[Furry]

Thanks for your reply, PixelPest. The noise suggestion will help in some cases but I hope Serif soon comes around to adding a few more tools.

[firstdefence]

Sounds like you are talking about the Photoshop Effects in Illustrator.

[telemax]

Perhaps you need your own seamless textures set, as Assets?

 

[walt.farrell]

9 hours ago, Furry said:

Is there any equivalent in Designer to Illustrator’s Effects Gallery? I am wanting, in particular, to achieve a grain surface or a sandstone surface.

You may find Affinity Styles that will give a surface like that. You may also consider applying a bitmap Fill, using any image of sandstone that you can find on the web.

[firstdefence]

If you have Affinity Photo and you are on Windows the G'Mic plugin (free) has a large array of effects, you can apply effects in Affinity Photo and edit in Affinity Designer. If you are on Mac G'mic will not work in Affinity Photo so you'd have to install Gimp and create textures from there... There is also the epic FilterForge (paid for) that has a multitude of textures and works on Mac in Affinity Photo.

[Furry]

 

11 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

Sounds like you are talking about the Photoshop Effects in Illustrator.

Yes, firstdefence, that is exactly what I am talking about, though it is the first time I have heard them called Photoshop effects.I have only ever used them in Illustrator which I have always regarded as a vector-based program. Yes, I am on a Mac, so G’Mic is off limits. I don’t know that the chasing around is going to be worth it for the small number of times when it would be useful to me. It’s just that one such opportunity came up today and hence my initial post.

[Furry]

10 minutes ago, telemax said:

Perhaps you need your own seamless textures set, as Assets?

 

 

If I had sufficient call to produce such a surface, telemax,

 

then I woud certainly consider it. But, as I said in my previous post, at this stage I don’t think it is worth the hassle.

[Furry]

12 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

You may find Affinity Styles that will give a surface like that. You may also consider applying a bitmap Fill, using any image of sandstone that you can find on the web.

Thanks for the suggestions, Walt. My caution with using bitmaps in a vector-based image is that printing it at a large size can show a decline in quality.

[firstdefence]

28 minutes ago, Furry said:

 

Yes, firstdefence, that is exactly what I am talking about, though it is the first time I have heard them called Photoshop effects.I have only ever used them in Illustrator which I have always regarded as a vector-based program. Yes, I am on a Mac, so G’Mic is off limits. I don’t know that the chasing around is going to be worth it for the small number of times when it would be useful to me. It’s just that one such opportunity came up today and hence my initial post.

Adobe can be sneaky at times, the illustrator "vector" effects are more to do with manipulating shapes and paths than actual vector effects. The Photoshop effects will be raster effects not vector. 

[StuartRc]

You can easily create your own vector scalable patterns and textures using symbols and rectangular blocks...

Construction
A background from ammonite (Which is a vector image using grunge vector textures)
B. Overlay of 9 seamless patterns to test effects. Manipulated using layer adjustments and overlay settings (recolour) then mixed average | multiply | colour | colour burn etc..

Original patterns based on brush textures (vector) original size=200 px resized to 300mm squares