Drag / Drop bitmap fill to colour and swatch panel

[Ash]

Apps: All
Platforms: Windows and macOS

In V2 we added the new feature of being able to drag an image file, asset or stock item directly into a selected object's fill colour in the context toolbar to quickly create a bitmap fill. This could be slightly fiddly, so as has been suggested by a number of customers we have also now made it so you can drag and drop a bitmap texture onto either the colour or swatch panel too.
 

[Patrick Connor]

Known Issues

• AFP-5971 - Cannot drag bitmaps from within the app to a colour well (macOS)

Further known issues will be added to this list as they are reported to us by customers in this thread.

[StuartRc]

I find this feature really useful. Been using it lots recently and added a set of seamless patterns to assets as vector files to play around with it. It works well!. Except for the annoying 'jump' in the context menu bar (to left) when you try to re-apply another 'asset swatch'. It's a UI issue really where the Fill field on the context bar switches to first position (Removes Context: Fill | Stroke) when you try to apply a new pattern to the Fill swatch

[Frozen Death Knight]

A really great improvement, thank you. I appreciate that it now supports all kinds of assets and not just the ones containing a single layer. 

I found a couple of limitations remaining.

1) It is not possible to drag and drop assets into the Colour/Swatches panel if you are using a brush. You need an Image/Vector Layer to make the feature work, even though brushes actually support the same thing.

2) You can't drag and drop swatches from the Swatches panel like you can with the Assets panel.

[Ash]

29 minutes ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

1) It is not possible to drag and drop assets into the Colour/Swatches panel if you are using a brush. You need an Image/Vector Layer to make the feature work, even though brushes actually support the same thing.

That's an interesting point - we'll take a look at that!

29 minutes ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

2) You can't drag and drop swatches from the Swatches panel like you can with the Assets panel.

I'm not sure what behaviour you would expect there that is any different to just single clicking the swatch?

[Frozen Death Knight]

10 minutes ago, Ash said:

I'm not sure what behaviour you would expect there that is any different to just single clicking the swatch?

Well, I guess it has more to do about consistency since bitmap fills and swatches have a lot in common. Also, I noticed back during 2.0 testing that you can save swatches with bitmap fills, but the swatches become corrupted if you try to use them in another document. Swatches history is a bit wonky as well with some bitmap fills being saved while others don't update the list.

I made more thorough threads discussing these topics if you wish to read them.

 

[EricP]

I could not find how this feature works (on mac). Tried to drag an image on colour panel (in the circle) but the image just get moved outside the artboard. Is there a modifier key or something ?

[Chris B]

On 2/15/2023 at 5:20 PM, EricP said:

I could not find how this feature works (on mac). Tried to drag an image on colour panel (in the circle) but the image just get moved outside the artboard. Is there a modifier key or something ?

It looks as though on macOS dragging to the colour well on the Colour Panel does not work within the app - I can only get it to work dragging from Finder.

[oscarlosan]

Very good Affinity, I like the idea of not creating new panels like adobe and using the same ones we know. I wish it could be filled with vector symbols. With that we would have solved the vector patterns. It would be an amazing dream.

[rvsf]

On 2/8/2023 at 6:24 AM, Ash said:

Apps: All
Platforms: Windows and macOS

In V2 we added the new feature of being able to drag an image file, asset or stock item directly into a selected object's fill colour in the context toolbar to quickly create a bitmap fill. This could be slightly fiddly, so as has been suggested by a number of customers we have also now made it so you can drag and drop a bitmap texture onto either the colour or swatch panel too.

Note: On macOS, you need to drag to the colour well on both the swatches and colour panel. On Windows, you can drag to anywhere on the colour or swatches panel. Windows has the correct / preferable behaviour and this will be added to macOS in an updated build soon.

This update is just a small improvement. Patterns are still the big Achilles heel of affinity.  Please include vector patterns or at least the ability to add them to the palette in bitmap format. This is the only reason why I keep using illustrator. Affinity vs Illustrator:


 

[Ash]

14 minutes ago, rvsf said:

This update is just a small improvement

Yes you are correct, it is just a small workflow improvement we have been asked for.

 

15 minutes ago, rvsf said:

Please include vector patterns

Yes this is definitely on our radar as required, but will not be in this update unfortunately.

16 minutes ago, rvsf said:

or at least the ability to add them to the palette in bitmap format

Don't know if this helps  - but you can create an asset in vector, drag it into your assets and then drag / drop into a shape. This does convert it to bitmap (and realise ideally we would just accept it as a vector tile) but it's much more efficient than exporting as PNG first.

 

 

 

[rvsf]

8 hours ago, Ash said:

Yes you are correct, it is just a small workflow improvement we have been asked for.

 

Yes this is definitely on our radar as required, but will not be in this update unfortunately.

Screen Recording 2023-03-01 at 10.54.18.mov 26.92 MB · 7 downloads

Don't know if this helps  - but you can create an asset in vector, drag it into your assets and then drag / drop into a shape. This does convert it to bitmap (and realise ideally we would just accept it as a vector tile) but it's much more efficient than exporting as PNG first.

 

 

 

Thank you very much Ash! it's not the best solution but it's a very good solution for the moment! keep up the good work!

[rvsf]

22 hours ago, Ash said:

Yes you are correct, it is just a small workflow improvement we have been asked for.

 

Yes this is definitely on our radar as required, but will not be in this update unfortunately.

Screen Recording 2023-03-01 at 10.54.18.mov 26.92 MB · 8 downloads

Don't know if this helps  - but you can create an asset in vector, drag it into your assets and then drag / drop into a shape. This does convert it to bitmap (and realise ideally we would just accept it as a vector tile) but it's much more efficient than exporting as PNG first.

 

 

 

Ash the last question, can I know the pattern size? If yet cant see in this version it will be interesting for new versions. In my shoe designs I have to include different pieces with the same pattern size. Thank you!

 

[Ash]

7 hours ago, rvsf said:

Ash the last question, can I know the pattern size? If yet cant see in this version it will be interesting for new versions. In my shoe designs I have to include different pieces with the same pattern size. Thank you!

Yes I understand what you mean. I think we want to consider this more fully - another aspect of things we want to sort out in future is being able to define the size of assets generally, and fills. And to be able to do it to scale too. e.g. if you had an asset of a plan view of a table, you could say it was 2m long then whatever document you drag it onto it would place it at that size, based on the drawing scale the document is set to. This will also apply to fills - so you could say a fabric texture swatch relates to 10cm x 10cm in real world, then the fill will be added at that real world size if that makes sense.

I understand you are not asking that specifically and probably just want to see in the fill tool what px dimensions the texture tile has been scaled to (and perhaps % scale too) similar to a placed image like below?

But think my point is more that we want to consider this in the round of accounting for scaled assets too so will be something in a future update.

However, one bit of news which might help: we are adding to the new vector flood fill and option to add bitmap fill as non-scaled. So if you have an asset set up at the correct size you want it to be then every shape you add it to will be added at that size, without auto scaling to fit. This will hopefully be in an update in the next week or so so will definitely be worth checking out.

[EricP]

It's definitely a great workflow enhancement. Thanks for that.

Somehow I cannot drag the vector group in asset panel like in Ash's video. I can use the "add from selection" menu to add it but not drag and drop it in asset panel. Is there a trick I missed ?

 

 

[rvsf]

26 minutes ago, EricP said:

It's definitely a great workflow enhancement. Thanks for that.

Somehow I cannot drag the vector group in asset panel like in Ash's video. I can use the "add from selection" menu to add it but not drag and drop it in asset panel. Is there a trick I missed ?

drag and drop to asset panel.mov 3.15 MB · 0 downloads  

 

It is stranger, I can drag and drop (only I tested on Windows, no mac)

[rvsf]

16 hours ago, Ash said:

Yes I understand what you mean. I think we want to consider this more fully - another aspect of things we want to sort out in future is being able to define the size of assets generally, and fills. And to be able to do it to scale too. e.g. if you had an asset of a plan view of a table, you could say it was 2m long then whatever document you drag it onto it would place it at that size, based on the drawing scale the document is set to. This will also apply to fills - so you could say a fabric texture swatch relates to 10cm x 10cm in real world, then the fill will be added at that real world size if that makes sense.

I understand you are not asking that specifically and probably just want to see in the fill tool what px dimensions the texture tile has been scaled to (and perhaps % scale too) similar to a placed image like below?

But think my point is more that we want to consider this in the round of accounting for scaled assets too so will be something in a future update.

However, one bit of news which might help: we are adding to the new vector flood fill and option to add bitmap fill as non-scaled. So if you have an asset set up at the correct size you want it to be then every shape you add it to will be added at that size, without auto scaling to fit. This will hopefully be in an update in the next week or so so will definitely be worth checking out.

Yes! If I can see pixels and change percent this would be enough for me, altought if you add vectorial assets also it would be a good idea to keep the original size. The workflow in illustrator seems worse to me, but it is more configurable, I just need more configuration in affinity.

[EricP]

1 hour ago, rvsf said:

It is stranger, I can drag and drop (only I tested on Windows, no mac)

yes, seems like a regression on the beta branch as I can do it in the non-beta 2.0.4

[Aammppaa]

Could this behaviour be extended to allow us to drag and drop an object from the layers panel into the fill of another object? 

At present I'd have to add the layer to the assets panel, or save it out to a file, and then drag it to the fill. But why do we need the intermediary step?