Improvements for Game Art (Video)

[PassiveAggressor]

Hey all

I've made a video showing several features (and bug fixes) that would make AF better for game art.

Hope you find it useful

Cheers,

Passive

[PassiveAggressor]

Please note that although this has some bugs listed in it, I didn't want to duplicate the post in bugs, hope that's ok?

[PassiveAggressor]

Maybe this got lost in the torrent of request you get, but I still think its worth looking at.
I understand that looking at a video may be too time comsuming so here is a bullet point list:

BUGS:

Fine Line bad pixels (nozzle generation?)
Inconsistance pixel brush sizes
Export selection exporting whole image
Can't size exported brush to original size

FEATURES:

New Document Texture type presets (e.g. 512x512, 1024x1024)
Create image brush from selection
Keyboard shortcut for rotate brush 90 degrees ( e.g. Alt+] )
Filter to automatically colour match images/layers
Circle selection from center
Tiled/Repeating view for making seamless textures
Option for Move tool to drag out a copy of the selection

[Medical Officer Bones]

You mention in your video that you like the colour picker's transparency pickup. Pro Motion NG does it even better: the transparency and colour can be picked up separately, which is super handy when doing pixel art. Which makes sense, since PM NG is specialized in pixel art.

Most of your wishes are part of Pro Motion NG, btw: easy pick up of brushes, direct manipulation of those brushes (mirror, rotation, etc. all with keyboard shortcuts), dedicated pixel drawing tools which are much more precise than regular image editors, indexed colour mode, excellent colour palette control, animation, tiles, etc.

But no advanced non-destructive filters, of course.  

To be honest, I don't think Affinity Photo is such a great option for pixeling. Too many quirks and limitations. Nor is Pro Motion NG good at general image editing.

No app does it all.

[Andy Somerfield]

Hi,

I am pleased to report that we have been working through some of the items mentioned here:

 

- In Photo 1.8.3, the [ and ] keys will step the Pixel Brush in exact, single pixel sizes.

- Brush rotation is already available using the left / right arrow keys.

- We have added the ability to create brushes from the current selection in Photo 1.9 - which will become available in beta in a few weeks.

- Circle selection can be set to "from centre" in Photo 1.9.

 

We will continue adding / fixing the things reported

 

Thanks,

Andy.

[Frozen Death Knight]

3 hours ago, Andy Somerfield said:

Hi,

I am pleased to report that we have been working through some of the items mentioned here:

 

- In Photo 1.8.3, the [ and ] keys will step the Pixel Brush in exact, single pixel sizes.

- Brush rotation is already available using the left / right arrow keys.

- We have added the ability to create brushes from the current selection in Photo 1.9 - which will become available in beta in a few weeks.

- Circle selection can be set to "from centre" in Photo 1.9.

 

We will continue adding / fixing the things reported

 

Thanks,

Andy.

Thank you, thank you, thank you! Been waiting for a brush creation from selection feature for a long time. So happy it's coming! Transform from centre for Circle Marquee is great to hear. I presume this also applies to the Rectangular Marquee tool as well? : D

[Andy Somerfield]

Hi,

We have managed to get the texture presets in for 1.9 too

Andy.

[Andy Somerfield]

Hi again,

Further to the other things, we are looking to add more support for game art users - can't promise this for 1.9 but we are working on it..

 

 

(I have two documents open here - you can see the texture itself, the other document is the normal map - both are being edited and a realtime preview is being rendered on a .obj model in the new Model panel).

Thanks,

Andy.

 

[Medical Officer Bones]

Now, that: ....is interesting, to say the very least. It actually looks amazing - if you guys get that up to a Substance Painter level of quality, you will gain the support of, and an influx of, a great number of game artists. 

[Andy Somerfield]

Thanks Bones,

Early days for sure - we will be looking to the beta user community to help us make sure we get this right, when we are in a position to release a build which supports it.

Andy.

[Frozen Death Knight]

Agree with Mr. Bones here. That is really interesting stuff. As someone who is actively learning 3D, I could see a lot of artists finding good use in doing additional edits of their textures in Affinity. It might be a bit too much wishful thinking of it replacing Substance Painter in every scenario from the get go, but with enough care and support it has some great potential! : )

[Frozen Death Knight]

On 4/16/2020 at 8:53 PM, Andy Somerfield said:

Thanks Bones,

Early days for sure - we will be looking to the beta user community to help us make sure we get this right, when we are in a position to release a build which supports it.

Andy.

Looking forward to it! Will be testing it for sure! ^-^

Also good that you are not rushing things and getting the users' feedback on it early. Don't want another Photoshop scenario where they added 3D support just for the sake of it and then left it to rot just to buy up the competition years later. : P

[TheFlow]

Oh yeah! Thank you so much for this. Gives me hope for a golden future. While some other softwares get worse with every 'update', you improve all the time. As a 3D artist I am more than happy to see you guys being behind this!

[Renzatic]

1 hour ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

Agree with Mr. Bones here. That is really interesting stuff. As someone who is actively learning 3D, I could see a lot of artists finding good use of doing additional edits of their textures in Affinity. It might be a bit too much wishful thinking of it replacing Substance Painter in every scenario from the get go, but with enough care and support it has some great potential! : )

The one biggest feature that no other program has quite managed to match Substance Painter on is it's flexible procedural mask generators. Using them, you can add massive amounts of detail to an object with only a minimal expenditure of time and effort. 

If Serif wants to compete with Adobe on the 3D painting front, this should be the one area they'll need to focus most of their effort on. 

[Frozen Death Knight]

Btw, @Andy Somerfield. Will the 3D painting system have UDIM support when you do decide to do an official Beta? I know many people who work with multiple texture tiles with varying levels of resolution nowadays, so it is going to be a highly requested feature since it is an industry standard.

[Barayase]

Well this is most welcome, a PBR workflow in a photo editor? I second UDIM workflow as well. What would specs for the graphics card be since apple is deprecating OpenGL and the state of 3d on a mac without nvidia complicates things, is this all metal what about pc then?

[Metin Seven]

Wow, being predominantly a 3D designer, this is a very welcome addition to me, thanks @Andy Somerfield! 👍

[PukkaFactor]

This is what I do most of the time with other software. I never dreamed Affinity would be developing something like this. This is a great start to a potentially huge market. If this ever comes close to SP you will have legions of Adobe deserters paying for this app. Sign me up for the beta!

[pixeltrain3d]

This is great news.

Thanks, looking forward to it 🙂

Helge

[simonsanchezart]

That modelling stuff looks awesome! I don't think it will reach the full pbr capabilities of Substance Painter, but for hand-painted/stylized models, having the tools that Photo offers would be fantastic, I guess it would be great for decals too.

 

As someone who enjoys pixel art, here are some things that would be nice to see (maybe they're already there but I don't know)

- Remove anti-aliasing from any brush, this way any brush tip can be used for pixel art.

- Palette indexation, having the document linked to a palette, if you modify a color in the palette, it gets modified in the image

- Rotsprite algorithm, makes it so you can rotate pixel art without destroying it too much http://info.sonicretro.org/RotSprite

- Animation capabilities, not only for pixel art, but animation features would be nice to see, or it could be it's own software.

- Luminosity based desaturation, useful for painters too (https://docs.gimp.org/2.6/en/gimp-tool-desaturate.html)

 

 

[VisionsMind]

This is AMAZING news! Even created the forum account just to write this comment!
As a 3D Game Artist I have ditched Adobe and Substance products a while ago.

As others have stated already, I think procedural noise generators are HUGE in this workflow.

However, I DO NOT AGREE with what some have said - please, DO NOT TRY and compete with already established 3D Painting Apps. This would grow out of hand and suddenly would fall in the rabbit hole that almost led to Quixel's failure as a Photoshop Plugin back in the day.

I'd advise to simplify  -Quixel Megascans and Quixel Mixer are free now, with Armour Painter, Several Blender Addons, the 3D painting stuff is already growing.

My suggestion would be to simplify and focus on what you guys already have in your advantage - a great 2D Vector app and a great 2D painting/Photo manipulation app.

With this, I'd focus on the following:
- Texture Maps conversion (Hieght to Normal, roughness maps, normal to AO,  and usual pbr texture maps conversion)

- ID Maps/Masking workflow improvements in the Layer Stack (instead of having to colour select each color to creat masks, having an IDMap picker that automatically masks the current Layer would be a huge time saver.
- Seamless/Tileable automation tools, Tileable painting features (Krita has a Canvas Wrap Around mode that automatically tiles brush strokes while handpainting textures, etc)
- Photo editing tools to create texture maps from photos - shadow removal, light removal (Albedo != Diffuse - any light information shouldn't be present in a good texture set for accurate PBR results) convert from color to normal, height, etc
- a HUGE thing in an app suite like yours would be Normal Map Painting/Sculpting - adding vector shapes, paintstrokes, gradients, etc that correctly blend as Normal maps shapes allowing to set height/intensity, Bevel Scales, etc - this was a huge selling point for NDO back in the day)

This could be a HUGE opportunity for you guys to create a features set that would turn Affinity Photo/Designer  Combo into the best Texturing Companion workflow for 3D artists. 90% of people already have their Texture Workflow defined, so again, PLEASE do not try to compete with that, instead leverage what your apps do best and make it the best "Texture Adjustment/Fixing/TweakingEtc" tool, everyone has Substance Painter or similar, but still almost everyone goes to tools like Photo to fix, adjust, edit, add to the Textures without having to load a huge 3D App Project. So These are my suggestions.

I'm eager to see what you awesome peeps at Affinty are up to in this regard, so please, if you need some beta testing/ideas etc, I'd be more than happy to test stuff, experiment with workflows, test things out, etc.
 

Edited April 17, 2020 by VisionsMind

[Frozen Death Knight]

1 hour ago, simonsanchezart said:

- Remove anti-aliasing from any brush, this way any brush tip can be used for pixel art.

Already exists. It's literally called the Pixel Tool.

[simonsanchezart]

26 minutes ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

Already exists. It's literally called the Pixel Tool.

Doesn't work for textured brushes

[Frank Jonen]

23 hours ago, Andy Somerfield said:

Hi again,

Further to the other things, we are looking to add more support for game art users - can't promise this for 1.9 but we are working on it..

 

 

(I have two documents open here - you can see the texture itself, the other document is the normal map - both are being edited and a realtime preview is being rendered on a .obj model in the new Model panel).

Thanks,

Andy.

 

😮😲

I hope you don't go full kitchen sink on this but keep it basic and focused. 

We have great evolving tools with Quixel Mixer, ArmorPaint and Mari. What none of these do well, not even Mari is decals. Anything artwork related excessively sucks to do in all texture painting apps. You always have to leave the app.

With your approach I'm getting some hope that I can design the decals in place as vector art, keep it nimble. That way we can either just export the albedo/base with the decals and load them into Quixel to include in a WIP material or work on finished textures to paint decals into.

Right now a workflow like that (that is reliable and respects OCIO) doesn't exist. Photoshop only works well up to 16-bit integer. Affinity doesn't have that problem. I can just roundtrip without sacrifice for the first time ever. And with an in-context texture preview, now that's really something. 

A "dumb" bump map support would be great. That way we can see light effects of the displacement without tesselation slowing us down. Maybe a toggle between bump and displacement view? Old school bump maps are almost forgotten these days, but for fast previews of displacement features they're very useful.

 

 

 

 

[Frozen Death Knight]

1 hour ago, simonsanchezart said:

Doesn't work for textured brushes

Looks pretty pixelated to me. Even tried it myself and the brushes are actually pixelated with the Pixel Tool. Here's a screenshot to prove it. Seems to me like you haven't used the tools enough.