Any V2 improvements for game dev, e.g. easier channel packing?

[profanicus]

I didn't see this in 'What's New', but does Affinity Photo 2 have anything that makes it more viable for game dev?

I recently bought v1 hoping to free myself from the Photoshop shackles, but the colour channels in particular are too hard/slow to work with. In PS I can just copy/paste directly to R/G/B/A.

The other things I miss are a tiling noise/clouds generator, and a properly working PNG export (like SuperPNG does).

[Frozen Death Knight]

@profanicus They added a Normals Adjustment Layer and improved other things like masking which will be useful for game textures. I think they made some changes to working with channels as well, but I haven't experimented enough to be sure. I hope that when they add actual 3D painting to Photo as they teased back in 2020 that they will add texture channel packing similar to how Substance Painter does it. That and DDS support (would give Affinity a significant edge over Adobe that rely on 3rd part add-ons).

[kirk23]

I find it too hard and slow  to copy/paste into channels manually.  Affinity Photo has a natural way to pack channels    same as Photoshop  by just setting  into what channel a group or layer would  input too.   Do a macro  that creates necessary  layer structure and then it will always be just one click.

They added  "hide" and 'hide other"  for selected layers   that   together with select same tagged layers  works kind of similar to layercomps in Psh. You can quickly switch in between  color/normal/roughness  of your document .  The export is still manual although.

They added transform links  like chain links in Photoshop.   So you can link color/normal/roughness layers  to stay always in sync  together  whatever different group they need to be in.  But you have  uncheck auto select groups  and never select and move a group . If you do it ignores those transform links ( contrary to PS)

They fixed the displacement more or less although you still can't control  direction of displacement. Nevertheless you can do a kind of erosion effect on height image  by doing a series of 1 pixel  displacements  gradually fading  one after another ( if you record a macro) . Same as the slope blur in Substance Designer.   

Affinity photo still makes black holes to any open tga  or any file with alpha  where alpha is zero.     No fix for that.   You can avoid  to make one while export  by adding some 0.00001  alpha  value  beyond  what 8 bit  file can handle  but the black hole is still there when you open the file back.  

 

 

 

[profanicus]

Thanks for the replies!

48 minutes ago, kirk23 said:

I find it too hard and slow  to copy/paste into channels manually.  Affinity Photo has a natural way to pack channels    same as Photoshop  by just setting  into what channel a group or layer would  input too.   Do a macro  that creates necessary  layer structure and then it will always be just one click.

That's cool, though I guess I'm more referring to the natural way I can work with channels in PS, not just for PBR stuff but for work with particles and shaders. Like being able to select a channel and paint straight into it, or adjust its levels, or run other filters per channel directly.

48 minutes ago, kirk23 said:

Affinity photo still makes black holes to any open tga  or any file with alpha  where alpha is zero.     No fix for that. 

Yeah I think that's like the PNG export I mentioned, where alpha 0 is black in the exported image. I think the fix for this is to have your alpha channel as a mask at the top layer, and a solid colour layer at bottom (at least for PNG this seems to work). To be fair PS sucks at this too, hence SuperPNG which does it for you using an actual channel in your document.

6 hours ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

They added a Normals Adjustment Layer

Installed the V2 trial and had a look and yeah that is kind of nice!

Edited November 11, 2022 by profanicus

[ARTurek]

1 hour ago, profanicus said:

Yeah I think that's like the PNG export I mentioned, where alpha 0 is black in the exported image. I think the fix for this is to have your alpha channel as a mask at the top layer, and a solid colour layer at bottom (at least for PNG this seems to work).

In TGA it works too.
I just have to remember to separate the alpha from the color layer before editing the file. I can't just open and edit a file, I have to prepare it before that.