Pixel layer strokes not rendering outside of parent layer bounds

[vczf]

I can't pin down exactly what's triggering this. Maybe hardware acceleration related? The strokes stop rendering when reaching the previous bounds of the parent vector layer. Hiding and showing the layer resets it.

2022-06-24 00-52-31.mkv

[firstdefence]

What system are you on, what system spec? Can you create a sample file to upload that still does this or is this document specific?

I'm currently on Catalina and cannot reproduce this.

[Lee_T]

Hi Vozf,

Does this happen with Hardware Acceleration on/off or both?  Edit > Preferences > Performance ?

If it's document specific and you'd like to send us the file directly to take a look you can upload it -here-

Lee

[NotMyFault]

Probably related to one of these older cases

 

 

[thomaso]

It might not be involved nor solve the visibility issue but makes me just curious:
What are the two top most layers in your screenshot, it looks like a Layer layer and a nested "frame (Rectangle)" – whereas I don't understand how this "frame" is nested. Any kind of masking?

[vczf]

I managed to whittle down the file to a simple case with nested vector layers. See attached.

@thomasoThat vector-masked rectangle did not have an effect when I deleted it. The key is a top-level layer (with vector mask, disabled or enabled makes no difference). Then nest a vector layer inside it, and try to use pixel layers inside the child layer.

@LeeThorpeTurning hardware acceleration on or off doesn't have an effect.

@firstdefence I'm on Windows, but this also reproduces in Affinity Designer for iPad, and I now suspect it's universal.

nested layer pixel bounds.afpub

[thomaso]

16 minutes ago, vczf said:

I managed to whittle down the file to a simple case with nested vector layers.

To me the issue occurs even in a more simple setup: 2 layers only, pixel paint in a Layer layer:
(ps: same works fine outside of this parent layer / not in the video)

Feels like a 'simple' redraw issue. FWIW, my performance settings (my permanent default without getting such issues / I haven't tried others for this test). Since it is set not to use the separate GPU the mac's fan was speeding up quite obvious while painting the above strokes.

[vczf]

@thomaso Based on the more erratic way your pixels are disappearing, I think these are different issues. With the nested layers in my test case, the behavior of the strokes being "clipped" by the layer bounds is very consistent and repeatable. In your case, it looks like rectangular chunks of the canvas are failing to update.

[NotMyFault]

The issue matches the older one:

In Designer (or Publisher), a pixel layer nested to a layer layer or group layer causes severe delay of paint brush. In this Case, you need to zoom to get a valid rendering. You can identify the issue if you use the navigator panel: it’s thumbnail shows the correct result, only the canvas is severely delayed, until using zoom to enforce a redraw.

The observation that the redraw issue is related to the (inactive) rectangular vector mask is no proof of totally new unrelated bug.

 

[vczf]

@NotMyFaultI see that the zooming refreshes the canvas on my file also, thanks. That's much quicker than hiding and showing the layer.

[thomaso]

45 minutes ago, NotMyFault said:

a pixel layer nested to a layer layer or group layer causes severe delay of paint brush.

Sorry!, I did not look into your linked thread before, where Dan C mentioned this to be known and logged for all platforms …

On 1/14/2022 at 1:59 PM, Dan C said:

I can confirm that this issue is already logged for all platforms, the bug occurs when the Pixel layer is within a container layer (either a 'Layer' or 'Group').

[vczf]

With hardware acceleration enabled on Windows, I can sometimes get the behavior shown in @thomaso's example.

However, the nested-layer bounds-clipping reliably occurs in my test file no matter if hardware acceleration is on or off. A clearer example video attached.

2022-06-25 17-20-44.mkv

[NotMyFault]

The „virtual“ rectangle you observe is the bounding box around the visible layer content.  There are other issues documented where Affinity fails to render the canvas, and rendering artifacts occur aligned to these bounding boxes. (Mostly when dealing with alpha and having more than one vector mask, combined with alpha aware adjustments)
 

Note that wrt bounding boxes I relate to rendering level mip map process boxes (zoom level depending), and not the actual layer bounding box (move tool). Of course, both can look identical like in this case, but not in general.

To summarize: clearly a rendering bug, but I assume based on already identified common root causes (links I posted before).

If you want this clarified, you may open a new bug report in the bug section, and link to this post (in the questions section). 

[vczf]

I am disappointed to note that this bug continues to reproduce in Affinity 2 for Windows and iPadOS (on the 30 day trial).

However, I became curious why this is not a larger issue for other users. Further testing revealed that this behavior will not manifest if your uppermost (root) layers has a fill layer, which expands the rendering bounds to the whole canvas. You can have further nested layers or groups without strokes failing to render for this reason. This fill layer can be a white+multiply layer to have no visual effect, but as long as it's set to visible, it will fix this specific rendering fault.

Which is to say that this issue can be avoided by always working inside a single top-level "main" container layer with a fill, rather than having multiple layers or groups at the root level. If you want multiple root siblings, then you'd have to give each of them a fill layer child to avoid this rendering flaw.

Example attached to this post.

nested layer pixel bounds.afpub