My custom brushes have disappeared

[SuzanneIAm]

I have been working on some custom brushes for the Drawing and Pixel personas. The program just stalled and froze and I had to force quit. When I reopened Affinity Designer, all of the brushes I had been working on are gone. 

The brushes that came with the program are still there. I have been able to close and open the program before without loosing my brushes.

Does anyone know how I can get my custom brushes back?

[Move Along People]

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[SuzanneIAm]

It wasn't a document that I lost it was the brushes themselves. 

[Move Along People]

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[SuzanneIAm]

I created them a few days ago and was just testing them on a canvas that was never saved out. But I have closed the program before and was able to pull up my brushes in the brush menu in multiple documents. 

[Move Along People]

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[SuzanneIAm]

Thank you, haakoo, for the reminder on how to save a document. That was super helpful.

I'd appreciate to hear if anyone else has some useful information on pulling up brushes that were previously installed.

My Drawing persona brush menu was not affected. I only lost all of my previously installed Pixel brushes. 

[Move Along People]

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[R C-R]

13 hours ago, SuzanneIAm said:

I'd appreciate to hear if anyone else has some useful information on pulling up brushes that were previously installed.

It would help if you would tell us if you use a Mac or Windows PC, but basically all the brushes are stored in a single file somewhere in the per user file hierarchy (the "Home" folder on a Mac). If you have backed that up and that backup was made when your custom brushes were already added to that file, you can replace the current file with the backup & get your custom brushes back.

If you do not have a backup then the chances of recovering them are much lower, but that would depend on what exactly caused them to disappear in the first place.

[SuzanneIAm]

16 hours ago, haakoo said:

Sorry but I don't want to sound thick but ctrl+s and a backup is your friend in the computer age.
 

Haakoo, when you responded to me yesterday I had just lost about 5 hours of work, so I just wasn't going to respond well to a statement like this and I am not sure that anyone would. I am very new to Affinity and I didn't understand that the brushes weren't somehow saved into the program automatically like they do in other programs. I didn't find your statement to be helpful to my situation. If you had expanded upon your comment, as you did later, it would have been more relevant but the statement by itself was not helpful at all and came off like you were saying I was obtuse. Thank you for wishing me luck with my issue. I appreciate you taking the time to respond.

 

2 hours ago, R C-R said:

It would help if you would tell us if you use a Mac or Windows PC, but basically all the brushes are stored in a single file somewhere in the per user file hierarchy (the "Home" folder on a Mac). If you have backed that up and that backup was made when your custom brushes were already added to that file, you can replace the current file with the backup & get your custom brushes back.

If you do not have a backup then the chances of recovering them are much lower, but that would depend on what exactly caused them to disappear in the first place.

Thank you RC-R. I am using a Mac. 

[StuartRc]

Sounds as though the App Reset..

It's a not good feeling having your work deleted.!

 

Can I ask a couple of questions about the brushes?:

1.How many Brushes were you working on.

2.Were they vector; or Raster or both

3.Have you the original nozzles(images to recreate)

4.What style for what purpose? 

The reason I ask is that you may not be able to get them back (I am sure one of the Affinity Serif Masters may be able to help).. and maybe I could help in some way

[SuzanneIAm]

3 minutes ago, StuartRc said:

Can I ask a couple of questions about the brushes?:

1.How many Brushes were you working on.

2.Were they vector; or Raster or both

3.Have you the original nozzles(images to recreate)

4.What style for what purpose? 

The reason I ask is that you may not be able to get them back (I am sure one of the Affinity Serif Masters may be able to help).. and maybe I could help in some way

Thanks StuartRC! Here are the answers to your questions:

1. It was around 50 brushes. 

2. They were all Raster. For some reason, all of my vector brushes were not deleted like the raster ones were.

3. They were actually PSD brushes that I was using as a base and then tweaking. So I still have those original PSD brushes, but I spent a good deal of time making changes to the brush settings in Affinity to change them.

4. They are brushes I was creating that would allow you to add texture to illustrations.

It's looking like they might just be lost unless there is some file somewhere that is attached to the program itself?

I wasn't aware that I could save a blank document and all of my brushes would be saved to that document, as haakoo stated. I opened other documents in which the brushes appeared in brush menu and they are still not there, so I am confused on how that works. 

It sounds like when I am working on brushes, I need to just export them every now and then even if I am not done with them. But if you do know how I  might be able to salvage what happened this time around, I would appreciate it! 

[StuartRc]

Yeah...It's not strictly true...If you are working on Brushes is it advisable to constantly/export/ save just like you would with a file. If app resets they can get lost but...to be honest for me it has not been a common occurrence..

So technically you may have to recreate the brushes...However......

I have been working on a brush library for over a year...and have a large number of brushes and all the files used to create them...If you have a look in the resources...There are a few there...but I have many more that have not been released to the forum... 

If you have a look through and let me know which ones you would like redesign/edit...let me know could supply some of the original nozzles to you so you can edit (play around)...destroy....etc

...or you could just download and use them...up to you (NB: They are PC based but should be OK)

 

Adding texture to illustrations...mm....

Have a look at these and let me know what you think...When I first started...creating textures for placing into vectors were the first ones built.....

Dots

Hatching

Organics

I have moved on since to Project sets and Texture Paint (a group of around 1000 brushes)

 

 

 

 

 

[R C-R]

16 minutes ago, SuzanneIAm said:

I wasn't aware that I could save a blank document and all of my brushes would be saved to that document, as haakoo stated.

I don't think that is how it normally works -- if it did, that file could be huge, depending on how many raster brushes you have created & their pixel size.

Anyway, as I understand it, once you have created a brush, it should be added to the per user 'master' file of brushes. For Macs, the path to that file is a long one, like this one for Designer's raster brushes (where the leading tilde is shorthand for your user home folder):

~/Library/Containers/com.seriflabs.affinitydesigner/Data/Library/Application Support/user/raster_brushes.propcol

I am not exactly sure how often that file is updated but assuming the app is working correctly, from what I can tell here it is at least updated every time you edit anything in the Brushes panel when you click the "Close button." Regardless, if you navigate to that file's parent folder in Finder, the "Date Modified" time stamp should tell you when it was last updated. (If you don't know how to do that, just ask.) If you have a backup of that file somewhere else (like in a Time Machine backup or a similar backup utility) then look for one with a recent time stamp with the largest file size. If there is, then there is a very good chance that all or most of your custom raster brushes are in there, so replacing the one on your startup drive with that one should get them back. (Do this while Affinity Designer is not running to prevent any complications.)

However, from what you said in your last post, it may just be that you are in the Draw Persona, where only vector brushes appear in the Brushes Studio. So before doing anything else, switch to the Pixel Persona & see if your raster brushes appear in the Brushes Studio.

[SuzanneIAm]

55 minutes ago, StuartRc said:

I have been working on a brush library for over a year...and have a large number of brushes and all the files used to create them...If you have a look in the resources...There are a few there...but I have many more that have not been released to the forum... 

If you have a look through and let me know which ones you would like redesign/edit...let me know could supply some of the original nozzles to you so you can edit (play around)...destroy....etc

Stuart, that is so incredibly kind of you. Thank you. I haven't gotten to play around with your brushes yet, but from the preview sheet and giving them a quick glance, they look fantastic. 

Have you made any vector brushes that you've made that can behave like these raster brushes? From my experience so far, you can't really get the same effect with the vector brushes since there is no scatter, rotation, etc settings. 

33 minutes ago, R C-R said:

However, from what you said in your last post, it may just be that you are in the Draw Persona, where only vector brushes appear in the Brushes Studio. So before doing anything else, switch to the Pixel Persona & see if your raster brushes appear in the Brushes Studio.

I am in the Pixel Persona, I was just saying that the Draw Persona vector brushes were all there which was confusing me as to why my raster brushes in the Pixel Person were not. 

34 minutes ago, R C-R said:

~/Library/Containers/com.seriflabs.affinitydesigner/Data/Library/Application Support/user/raster_brushes.propcol

I am not exactly sure how often that file is updated but assuming the app is working correctly, from what I can tell here it is at least updated every time you edit anything in the Brushes panel when you click the "Close button." Regardless, if you navigate to that file's parent folder in Finder, the "Date Modified" time stamp should tell you when it was last updated. (If you don't know how to do that, just ask.) If you have a backup of that file somewhere else (like in a Time Machine backup or a similar backup utility) then look for one with a recent time stamp with the largest file size. If there is, then there is a very good chance that all or most of your custom raster brushes are in there, so replacing the one on your startup drive with that one should get them back. (Do this while Affinity Designer is not running to prevent any complications.)

Unfortunately, I only run my back up at the end of the day. This totally would have worked if I had backed up before the program crashed. UGH! Lesson learned. Thank you so much for your informative and extremely helpful answer.

It looks like I will be remaking the brushes! Thank you again to everyone for your help. 

[StuartRc]

Yep.....You need to go back to resources and locate The Project Brushes

I am Still currently working on these but there are 210 vector brushes available in these sets... Vector brushes are a bit more time consuming to produce (I am sure you are aware of that)

OK 

There are 6 Project Brush Sets so far. These contain refined brushes from the original Library and a lot of new ones (They are also the ones I use the most now) Most of the brushes in Poison are new and not based on original sets

3 Sets:Poison; Big-T and Ammonite have sets of Raster and Vector Brushes

Poison

Big-T 

Ammonite 

Poison is your best starting point (300 brushes 150Raster/150Vector) I put the sample/scamps with original drawing which is here: Poison

 

Enjoy!

Should save you a lot of work!