Max Resolution of PNG for Vector Brushes in Designer?

[Jens D. R.]

Hi,

I have been searching for information on the max resolution for creating vector brushes. Or maybe there is a resolution that is optimal?

To specify I need to make brushes that will be printable on a printing press without any pixelation effects. I have used a workaround in the past be vectorising the result in inkscape and re-imporing into designer. Inscape because it has an auto-trace-function. this is very time consuming when you are creating complex work that you have to be able to take apart into different layers.

So, I have decided to try creating my own custom "vector"-brushes to speed up the work. In order to get everything optimized I hunted around for all the facts I need to create optimal brushes off of the bat. But I had no luck in finding out about resolution constraints - specifically max resolution possible and if there is no cap, at which point does it become software breaking?

The Affinity Help ends on "open file" - lol.

Cheers

Jens

 

Edited May 13, 2022 by Jens D. R.
typo, added Tags

[Jens D. R.]

Wow, I thought this would be an easy question, that I was just too inept to find the answer by myself.

So apparently no one knows how many pixels long (length) or wide (thickness) an image for a brush can be. I thought at least some one from the staff would know this.

This is very frustrating because the only other option is to start experimenting. I thought it would be somewhere in the help/documentation: https://affinity.help/designer/English.lproj/pages/Painting/create_custombrushes.html

But sadly no help there. Shouldn't this information be part of the documentation?

Cheers

Jens

P. S. I am still not giving up hope that some one from the staff knows this and can provide an answer.

[postmadesign]

This is a good question, indeed. Responses here are slow sometimes, so I wrote a message on twitter to some professionals that make Affinity brushes. When I get an answer I will post it here.

[Jens D. R.]

8 minutes ago, postmadesign said:

This is a good question, indeed. Responses here are slow sometimes, so I wrote a message on twitter to some professionals that make Affinity brushes. When I get an answer I will post it here.

That is great. I am not a big twitter user myself and I was afraid to ask professional brush makers because they might think I am their competition and thus would not answer.

[Jens D. R.]

35 minutes ago, Hens said:

https://design.tutsplus.com/articles/everything-you-need-to-know-about-affinity-designer-brushes--cms-35217

 

Thank you for the reply, but it does not answer my question. The thread is about making the images as small as possible, which I do not want. I need it for actual printing.

The tutorials is nice - it explains how to create brushes but lacks any information about image sizes for creating brushes.

[Callum]

As far as I'm aware there is no hard limit other than the maximum resolution of the PNG format itself.

[postmadesign]

Brush maker Paolo Limoncelli of DAUB brushes gave me this reply:

Quote

there should be a limit of 1024px for stroke width with "live painting". Anyway you can use any pixel size you prefer. A 2048px height is more than enough for professional outputs. Width is up to you...

 

[Alfred]

49 minutes ago, postmadesign said:

Brush maker Paolo Limoncelli of DAUB brushes gave me this reply:

Quote

there should be a limit of 1024px for stroke width with "live painting". Anyway you can use any pixel size you prefer. A 2048px height is more than enough for professional outputs. Width is up to you...

 

Enrique Figueroa of Frankentoon Studio followed up with this:

Quote

Just adding to what @paololimoncelli said, I got this answer from @mattp4478 a couple of years ago (hope he doesn't mind), he's referring to raster brushes here, but I think it helps understanding how Affinity brushes work:

 

[Pšenda]

25 minutes ago, Alfred said:

followed up with this

Additional information only - it is a pity that inserting texts as an image makes this text unreadable / untranslatable for non-English speaking forum users (only at the cost of manual typing into the translator, so for such a large text it is de facto unreadable).

[Jens D. R.]

5 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

Additional information only - it is a pity that inserting texts as an image makes this text unreadable / untranslatable for non-English speaking forum users (only at the cost of manual typing into the translator, so for such a large text it is de facto unreadable).

True, but the twitter post was an image, sadly.

I quickly ran it through OCR... No spellchecking though:

Quote

Maximum nozzle size for pixel brushes isn't set anywhere - it would work quite
happily with basically whatever size you want to throw at it. What's much more
important though is to target the brush at the size you're expecting people to
use it at... Basically, if you ship a 8000*8000 pixel nozzle brush, you're inflating
your brush pack size hugely (it's a 64 megapixel image at the end of the day...)
and if l'm likely to actually use it at say 256 pixel size, then we will sample from a
mipmap, of a mipmap, of a mipmap, of a mipmap, of a mipmap, of a mipmap -
which will look fine, but it means that all that data had to be created (and exists
in memory somewhere) just to draw with a brush at a reasonable size.
Conversely, if you shipped a 512*512 pixel nozzle, you'd have a small brush
pack size, less memory footprint to draw with it, and if you chose to draw with it
at a larger size (2048 pixels for example) then it would be biljnearly resampled
larger on the fly, so wouldn't look blocky, just a tiny bit fuzzy - and most people
would never notice. The choice is obviously yours - the large or small textures
would draw at the same speed because they'll both be drawn from the nearest
mipmap for quality and speed reasons, but one of them will exert a huge
memory 'pressure' on the system for the once-in-a-while ability to draw at
enormous sizes...

 

[Jens D. R.]

Thanx everyone.

[walt.farrell]

20 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

it is a pity that inserting texts as an image makes this text unreadable / untranslatable for non-English speaking forum users (only at the cost of manual typing into the translator, so for such a large text it is de facto unreadable).

If you have a smartphone, and aren't avoiding Google, the Google Translate app will let you point your phone camera at that image and it will do a live translation into any of the languages supported by Google Translate.

[Alfred]

29 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

If you have a smartphone, and aren't avoiding Google, the Google Translate app will let you point your phone camera at that image and it will do a live translation into any of the languages supported by Google Translate.

Alternatively, there are a number of free online OCR services. However, the OCR utility that @Jens D. R. used worked fine, apart from getting confused by ”bilinearly” with a dotted red underline (so it was rendered as “biljnearly”).

[Pšenda]

Yes, there are a lot of ways to translate a page/image - it's not over to read forum posts with a camera, and constantly have them translated.
Thank you for your kindness and consideration towards the other members of the forum. Just for example

At the same time, so little is needed - to think and take into account that it will be read by someone else.

[Jens D. R.]

Wow. That is truly a let down. I still have to create the brushes I need. Perhaps I should use my old CS6 Illustrator from the get-go to avoid having blurry brushes like the example given above and needing to recreate them eventually.

This is exactly why I posed the question to begin with.

To make the image files smaller (bytes not resolution) it would be great if any of the Affinity products actually used and understood bitmap/line-art images - just ones and zeros. Then a brush would never feather and become blurry.

Sadly serif decided that bitmap/line-art images are out of date and not needed any more. "High-Resolution Greyscale images will do fine, just make them transparent png-files."

I have 2 catalogues (over 200 pages) that I frequently need to update for customers, full of line-art images of technical instructions, diagrams and electrical circuits which date back to the beginning of 2000. I would have loved to export (idml-file format) the catalogues so as to use publisher but I would have to reimport the images to make it work. There are up to 10 images per page which adds up to somewhere close to 2000 images to rework and reimport.

So I still use my CS6 InDesign for that.

Sorry for the tangent but I feel line-art/bitmap images have their value yet and especially when it comes to these "vector"-brushes.

I will probably do some experimenting on the weekend with the brushes and figure out if I can make it work.

Until the next update.

Cheers

Jens

Edited May 29, 2022 by Jens D. R.
typo