Saturation-consistent gradients, gradient points, and general evaluation

[RedMattis]

It would be really nice to have an option for making gradients that approximated or operated by Hue/Saturation/Value logic rather than just interpolating the RGB values.

Somewhat ironically the Affinity Designer's posterchild style, Unicorn, perfectly encapsulates the issues, by not offering the user any reasonable solution for the very thing it makes Affinity Appear capable of.

But let's digress about this for a moment. These are the problems I see with the current gradients and gradient options:

Gradient Points
Adding gradient points creates very harsh peaks, feeling a lot like linear interpolation rather than something tangent based. Generally this means that adding points to the gradient to control the colour variation if often counterproductive for smooth-looking effects, which is otherwise what you often want to use vector art for in the first place.

I'd at least want an option to get something more like the second graph.

Simple two point gradients tend to come out fairly well, but if you're interpolating two different RGB colours, well. This brings us to the next issue...

Stroke Gradient
Stroke gradient is something most competitors seem to have, and it is incredibly useful. I'm sure Affinity must have it in the pipeline by now, but the lack of it is really quite unfortunate.

I doubt most users make and export dozens of brushes as I do to get nice stroke gradients. Most probably don't even know how that works.

Colour Interpolation
There are no colour interpolation options. This was supossed to be the main topic of the thread.

If you're making colourful art, or colormasks for games, or anything else where you want to retain vivid colours then the color interpolation options are very lacking.

An easy way to reproduce this is to attempt creating a Rainbow (or any hue-slider rectangle) in Affinity. You'll get:

• Vivid Red
• Sewage Water
• Vivid Green
• Swamp Water
• Deep Blue
• Sad Purple

Right below you can see the standard RGBR gradient. Whether making mask-textures or art this is not an interpolation I would want for almost anything.

Right below it I ran a simply HSL Shift Adjustment in HSV-mode to bring up the luminosity and saturation to max, but this is of course only practical if you want to have fully saturated RGB colours, which is unlikely unless making masking textures.

Hue-gradient 3 and 4, are attempts by me at smoothing out the affinity gradient.

Stroke Outlines
A bit of an off-topic, but the inability to outline complex objects without constantly doing booleans or unstable Symbol->Compound hacks has often been a significant workflow issue.

Mesh Gradients
Another slight off-topicAffinity lacks mesh gradients, and it is a serious obstacle when making complex objects. Blurring, and stacking fills in objects is a very awkward workflow, and has a tendency to make Affinity quite crash prone.

...

With that said, let's go back to the Unicorn.

The Unicorn Style
The Unicorn perfectly encapsulates all the main issue I have with Affinity in this post. Because it solves all of them. With a hack.

• Affinity cannot make smooth gradients, or interpolate gradients between R, G, or B without losing saturation
• Affinity cannot make stroke gradients
• Affinity cannot interpolate colours in gradients without losing saturation

The Rainbow style...

• ... has no gradient, it is literally just a raster image of a rainbow pretending to be a gradient.
• ... isn't using a stroke gradient. It is a fixed stroke (which is not actually available to users in the brush menu at that)

In fact the rainbow stroke appears so hard-coded that attempting to tweak the stroke colour (possibly with normal texture image/intencity brushes) makes it stop rendering. Same goes for adding another stroke to the "Appearance Tab".

Would I recommend Affinity?
I think Affinity Designer 2 is a neat tool in many ways, and I do use it privately, but as a game developer I would not recommend my employer to invest in it for game development work

In order of priority:

1. Lack of scripting support. Our assset-specific requirements are often arcane, so this is very important.
2. Lack of solid RGB tools, gradients, etc. would results in making/generating RGBA masks troublesome.
3. Lack of Mesh Gradients. This would be required for any kind of advanced icons/graphics/etc.
4. Lack of group outline function beyond the fairly all-or-nothing QuickFX effect.
5. Many solutions are arcane, bug-prone, or convoluted. E.g. the symbol-compounds hack for outlines. Exporting tons of gradient textures for brushes. This is risky I think, and makes onboarding artists and collaboration between artists harder.

Final Word
I think Affinity Designer 2 is a neat tool in many ways, and I do use it privately for fun side projects. I do not think it is ready for use as a game asset creation tool on a large company.

 

[RedMattis]

Here is a full 12 page evaluation I wrote previously after deciding to dig through the features. It goes through most parts of Affinity Designer, including UI, Export Personas, etc.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oMkStY6x9HI3Ykb-FVLMAUISwjjDOr1Sp_z4qDKaJtM/edit?usp=sharing