Pattern Tile Creation and Fill

[Mark Oehlschlager]

I would like to request that Affinity Photo add the features of pattern tile creation and fill.

One should be able to define a rectilinear selection as a pattern tile, and be able to use that as a repeating fill. The pattern tile might be a repeating graphic motif, suitable for a wallpaper pattern, or it might be a material texture used to render surfaces.

In the case of creating seamless texture pattern tiles, it would also be useful to build an offset filter that would allow one to offset a tile diagonally and wrap the edge pixels so that a clone stamp tool or an in-painting brush tool could eliminate visual seams for the repeating tile pattern.

[Graymare]

Yes please.

One of the features I'm most sorely missing having migrated from Photoshop is Pattern Fill / Pattern Layer Style / Pattern Brush.  There are workarounds (applying patterns to shapes, saving those as styles, etc.) but good pattern implementation would be very welcome.  Ideally Affinity Photo would be able to read PS's .pat files.  

[John Rostron]

If you search for "tiles using affine" (including the quotes), you should find some helpful threads.

John

[Graymare]

That doesn't help. (If you mean this thread.)

Making tiles in Affinity Photo is possible with Affine, that's simple.  But actually using them in Affinity Photo is the feature that's being asked for here. There's no easy way (that I've found) to automatically tile an image inside an Affinity Photo workspace outside of a vector shape fill, nor to paint with one as a seamless pattern with a pixel brush.  Photoshop has/had both of these features.

[Hilltop]

With the picture frame selected, select the Fill Tool and, in the Context Toolbar select 'Bitmap' from the dropdown menu, select the image you want to use as a fill and adjust the placement handles in the picture frame until you have achieved the fill you're after. 

[fde101]

Yes, what @Hilltop outlined is the general method for setting a raster tile fill.  Currently missing is the ability to create a vector tile fill.  The existing feature doesn't work with SVG files, for example - only raster images.  That is still missing.

[Graymare]

13 hours ago, Hilltop said:

With the picture frame selected, select the Fill Tool and, in the Context Toolbar select 'Bitmap' from the dropdown menu, select the image you want to use as a fill and adjust the placement handles in the picture frame until you have achieved the fill you're after. 

There is no "Fill Tool" that I can see?  There's Flood Fill Tool (with no pattern support) and Gradient Tool, Gradient allows the application of a bitmap tiled texture to a vector object.  If that's what you were trying to describe, I already pointed out that it exists and it's not what's being asked for here.   AF lacks the ability to work with vector tiles and cannot paint with patterns, manage them effectively nor use them outside of a bitmap applied to a vector shape, which is cumbersome for many tasks.

[Hilltop]

7 hours ago, Graymare said:

There is no "Fill Tool" that I can see?  There's Flood Fill Tool (with no pattern support) and Gradient Tool, Gradient allows the application of a bitmap tiled texture to a vector object.  If that's what you were trying to describe, I already pointed out that it exists and it's not what's being asked for here.   AF lacks the ability to work with vector tiles and cannot paint with patterns, manage them effectively nor use them outside of a bitmap applied to a vector shape, which is cumbersome for many tasks.

I must have misunderstood you, I thought you were mentioning the absence of a tool to tile images in a shape: "There's no easy way (that I've found) to automatically tile an image inside an Affinity Photo workspace outside of a vector shape fill, nor to paint with one as a seamless pattern with a pixel brush."

[Graymare]

13 hours ago, Hilltop said:

I must have misunderstood you, I thought you were mentioning the absence of a tool to tile images in a shape: "There's no easy way (that I've found) to automatically tile an image inside an Affinity Photo workspace outside of a vector shape fill, nor to paint with one as a seamless pattern with a pixel brush."

Here I mention that you can, indeed, fill a seamless pattern tile with a vector shape fill.  It's the only way that I've found so far, but hoping for more pixel based & management options like Photoshop has.

[Hilltop]

13 hours ago, Graymare said:

.... but hoping for more pixel based & management options like Photoshop has.

I'm sure that is in Affinity's planning. 

[fde101]

On 7/18/2019 at 7:31 PM, Graymare said:

There is no "Fill Tool" that I can see?

It is called the "Gradient Tool" in Photo.  The same tool is called the "Fill Tool" in Designer and Publisher.  Apparently giving the tool a different name in Photo than it has in Designer and Publisher was determined to be less confusing than having a "Fill Tool" and "Flood Fill Tool" in the same application.