Brush tools

[Kuttyjoe]

I haven't used Affinity Designer yet.  As a user of DrawPlus on the PC for a few years, strictly for drawing/brushes, does Affinity Designer aim to be all that Drawplus is in terms of it's powerful drawing/brush tools?

[MattP]

Affinity Designer includes the same stroke brushes you'd find in DrawPlus - the ones which 'drape' a texture along the vector line and make it stretch/repeat to the length of the curve you've drawn, and it also includes solid vector lines that can vary in width and opacity based on the pressure profile you can edit in the Line Page. It also has a few specifics that DrawPlus didn't, including different corner logic for the stroke brushes and the ability to input using mouse/tablet velocity instead of pressure if you want.

 

It's also worth noting (as you haven't yet used Designer) that all of it happens live on the document while you're creating or editing your strokes - which looks pretty great!

 

We don't include the 'spray' brushes from DrawPlus because we have a full pixel editor that you should use to achieve this effect. So, it depends which bit of DrawPlus you enjoyed - there's no vector spray brushes, but apart from that it should be an all-round improvement!

[Kuttyjoe]

Sounds good.  I've been messing around with it for awhile now.  I think a lot of what makes DrawPlus good for drawing is in how it works.  The ability to touch a stroke and acquire all of it's properties, then make new strokes with those properties is a killer feature.  It doesn't work that way in Affinity, not yet anyway.  I'll wait until Affinity is close to launch to see just what gets implemented and what doesn't.

[MattP]

We don't automatically synchronise settings based on selection change like DrawPlus - this is for a couple of reasons, but the biggest single reason is that things in Affinity Designer get inserted into the document as you create them based on the current selection and the target mode you have chosen, so we can't have the selection interfering with your creation defaults now. This sounds like an odd choice but is actually extremely powerful - if I am inside an object with my current selection then I add another new object it will also be inside that object. However, we do update your defaults as you use the program - for example, make a circle, change it to red, make another circle and it is already red to help you. Also, you can click the button on the toolbar to set the creation defaults from the current selection's attributes at any time.

 

Cheers,

Matt