MattAP Posted April 21, 2016 Share Posted April 21, 2016 Hello! My names Matt and I work for retail company that designs fashion products. ( I work in It please excuse my poor design lingo) We have recently been looking at Affinity designer as an alternative to Photoshop. It looks like a great product and we are hoping to roll it out to about 20 users. Background info: We currently use Photoshop an Illustrator CS5 We do not use much of the adobe suite Some users do very basic tasks - changing colours, resizing minor editing. During testing we had a few of the designers come down to try out the trial. The more experienced users got to grips with most of the basics but they had some issues with the following: Creating brushes was very difficult for them - Before they would make a small drawing using the brush tool in illustrator (a stitch pattern for instance) and then they would turn that into a brush.I have attached an example of the pages that they would use as brushes. The issue is when opened Affinity creates layers of every single little line (or stitch) this makes it very difficult to select them as a whole - is there an easy way in affinity to take these patterns and turn them into a brush? I tried basic dragging and dropping into the brush window but that didn't work very well! Another issue that the users faced was filling an area with colour, They would select a line by clicking on it or selecting a few lines that create a whole shape - how would they fill this? in Photoshop they found this a lot easier - is there a particular way in affinity to fill an area that has been outlined by lines? I do apologies in advance for anything that's unclear and please let me know if you'd like some more information and I will explain it as best I can. I can also try and find some example files that may help to explain. Matt. knitwear brushes.eps Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff MEB Posted April 21, 2016 Staff Share Posted April 21, 2016 Hi MattAP, Welcome to Affinity Forums :) Do you need to keep the brushes as vectors or they can be raster based? Currently it's not possible to convert vector objects into a brush keeping them as vectors. You can however create a raster based brush (from images) that follow a path. I'm not sure if this suits you since you provided an eps with vector objects. Regarding the secong issue, If the lines where drawn using independent open paths (lines), they don't conform a shape (they just overlap) and cannot be filled as a vector shape without joining them first (editing their nodes to create a closed shape). If the lines are raster based then they can be filled using the Flood Fill Tool in the Pixel Persona. You can also convert the vector lines into an image (rasterise) to be able to use the Flood Fill Tool, grouping all the lines (select the lines then press ⌘ (cmd) + G) then right-clicking on the group layer in the Layers panel and selecting Rasterize.... MattAP 1 Quote A Guide to Learning Affinity Software | Affinity Quick Reference Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MattAP Posted April 21, 2016 Author Share Posted April 21, 2016 Hi MattAP, Welcome to Affinity Forums :) Do you need to keep the brushes as vectors or they can be raster based? Currently it's not possible to convert vector objects into a brush keeping them as vectors. You can however create a raster based brush (from images) that follow a path. I'm not sure if this suits you since you provided an eps with vector objects. Regarding the secong issue, If the lines where drawn using independent open paths (lines), they don't conform a shape (they just overlap) and cannot be filled as a vector shape without joining them first (editing their nodes to create a closed shape). If the lines are raster based then they can be filled using the Flood Fill Tool in the Pixel Persona. You can also convert the vector lines into an image (rasterise) to be able to use the Flood Fill Tool, grouping all the lines (select the lines then press ⌘ (cmd) + G) then right-clicking on the group layer in the Layers panel and selecting Rasterize.... Hi, Thanks for the response! I've been playing around with brushes now and have managed to get some working, Is there a plan to create vector brushes in the future? Another issue I have had with a lot of the users is how to use the fill tool - I am wondering if anyone could suggest a good video tutorial? I Can draw a circle and then choose the fill colour, I understand that. But what if I create something more complex - like a pretzel shape for instance and want to fill the negative spaces within the shape - example attached, Thanks! Matt. Example fill.afdesign Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff MEB Posted April 21, 2016 Staff Share Posted April 21, 2016 Yes, the Vector Brushes will be improved in a future version. Currently the raster based brush engine is much more developed. Regarding the pretzel, this is a little more tricky because it's created with a single line/brush (not a closed shape). So you have to create another path with the same form, fill it with a colour and put behind the pretzel to fill its inner parts. MattAP 1 Quote A Guide to Learning Affinity Software | Affinity Quick Reference Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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