Affinity Photo and Designer 2 . Anything new and cool for textures?
sublime tool
I am waiting for decades already when something truly convenient for textures would surfaced .
Sadly promising staff usually never goes up to a point where it's really there. I recall Creative house Expression and Xara where job usually took you just minutes , always non-destructive, never puzzled you . Too bad both are basically dead .
Affinity ones shows some promise but in fact years behind those two from early 90 th .
I am lazy to try. So does anyone have an opinion ? Is there anything new in version 2 worth trying?
Replies
Well, there's a new normal map adjustment layer: https://affinity.help/photo2/en-US.lproj/pages/Adjustments/adjustment_normals.html Not sure how useful this might be.
I haven't tried version 2 myself yet, overall it doesn't look like an awful lot has changed in this past year, feature-wise. No single big new feature or performance upgrade to sell the major new release - from what I'm hearing anyway. That's Photo - I pay rather little attention to Designer. That one already does what I need it to.
Seems like they instead took the time and did changes under the hood to benefit their development process and released it all as bit of a surprise package, leading to a bunch of issues currently. The forums are getting flooded with complaints.
It would almost appear that the audience for this type of application isn't exclusively the kind who have grown up with an iPad as their best buddy and are now sitting around for a living in a hipster cafe with a Macbook on the counter, smiling at their screen while sipping a Latte.
So, right now this isn't what I would call a productivity upgrade. Lets see where it stands in 3 or in 6 months time. What also factors into this is that Affinity in my mind has lost the 'plucky upstart' bonus. It's now an 8-year old application that after a great start has advanced rather little for my taste. Still issues with hardware acceleration on Windows for example.
Thanks thomasp . I did tried it for an hour. Sadly very little improvements. Some half baked.
For example I love drag and drop bitmap fill for vector shapes bit it never stays in same place when you do boolean operations . I loved Xara for just dropping normal and spec images to same bitmap filled vector shapes with feathered edges and it instantly turned you texture compositing file into normal map or roughness version doing "names" tagging automatically . And the scatter bushes along a vector path that had been way more convenient than Substance Designer splatters ever been. So much more precise and accurate with limitless input images and randomization. And so simple to control.
To bad Affinity Designer seems decades behind it if ever going to match it. I had a lot of hope on it since it can do same height blend SD does with it's pretty advanced layer linking system and 32 bit support. Xara doesn't unfortunately.
As of Photo I found a few nice new features. They fixed live displace filter. I even did something like slope blur from SD , 1 pix shift series ( by a macro with slider) but sadly you have no control over direction .
Normal map adjust is nice . like 3 substance nodes combined in one, rotate nm, intensity and channel flip but I'd rather prefer they would do an accurate height to normal live filter. It should be simple really . It even works with their 3 light sources lighting live filter but only in 32 bit after certain gamma fix.
Another feature I found is ability to hide other layers than selected by same tag /name . Kind of a baby version of layer comps from Photoshop .
Mesh wrap is live now . I always liked it a bit more than Photoshop one.
Layer linking system now supports transform links aka chain links in Photoshop. So doing a height blend you no more risking to have everything fall apart by accidentally shifting something .
You can add exr file as a brush nozzle. So could have whatever many nozzle pictures in a brush and lots of extra info like UV in same exr but no way to make lighter(max) blending in between each nozzle, only in between separate strokes. Also nozzles still doesn't work in vector Designer where they could do most of sense non-destructively speaking ( like in Xara)
Still works as a splatter replacement somehow if you are using macro recorder. and repeat for color /normal and roughness. It 's against Adobe religion or something to make Photoshop having nozzles ( multi channel brush dabs) and record-able jitters. I asked them in every feature requests for decades.
In a word all this is really nice but I am afraid it never going to be any useful with this pace while looking so close really. I already like their pixel content links better than anchors in Painter although.