Brushes need more work

The artbrushes introduced in V11 were a great feature but they are not complete. There are still a few key features that are missing.

• The ability to set beginning and end points for both stretching and repeating brushes
• The ability to erase with a brush
• Transparency and softness settings for all types of brushes
• The ability to use all types of transparency/blending modes in brush definition objects.
• The ability to set the resolution of brushes. (this can already be done by changing a registry setting so it just needs to be added to the UI)
• A remodel of the Lines Gallery to give better organization to the brushes.

A new bullet point: The ability to export as vector.
The brushes look great in their natural Xara habitat, but once released into the wild it's a different story.
I exported a simple acrylic 2 brush applied to a circle as a .pdf file (4.38 MB).
In Illustrator it failed to open correctly.
In Affinity designer it opened and at first glance there seemed to be a vector object, (a thin blue line surrounding the brush)
which, when I zoomed in was a pixellated version of the nice brush in Xara.
Nice try, Xara, but no cigar.
Don't get me wrong, I love Xara, but until the brushes and the whole Open Type Management debacle are sorted,
there will be no more upgrades for me (and a few others around these parts, too).
Bob.

To retain art brushes as vector data the output format (e.g. pdf) must be able to represent the arbitrary distortion of graduated fills and bitmap fills.

And the target application (Illustrator or Affinity) must be able to interpret that representation and render it.

I don't know whether pdf has that capability but if not art brush elements that are anything more than trivially simple (e.g. anything other than flat filled) will always be output as bitmap filled shapes. Higher bitmap resolution will improve the fidelity but make the files much bigger.

Phil

Thanks for replying, Phil. I'd settle for trivially simple vector brushes - Illustrator's are for the most part just that. Simple grungy brushes or halftones, for example.
Affinity's brushes aren't much to write home about. I'd like to see Xara have the capability of using the Illustrator Brush format, that would do it for me.
Bob.

Hi Bob,

If you keep your brush definitions simple, and if the brush strokes DON'T self-overlap or have tight corners, Designer will output them as vector shapes right now.

I guess the self-overlapping and tight corners conditions make things a bit unpredictable for end users and that's something we could look at improving.

Phil

Here's a hastily made halftone brush applied to Myriad Pro lettering using XDP.
Allowing for my poor draughtmanship in getting a perfect brush, the brush handles the X fairly well at 9 and 3 o'clock, not so well at 12 and 6.
Exports as vector to Illustrator, which is cool, but the distortions in the tighter angles is a bit odd. Illustrator handles this sort of thing better.
.xar file enclosed.
Bob.

Ok so lets add a couple more bullet points :)

• improvements to vector output
• decrease the pulling in tight corners

And I've also noticed that a problem exists with the way simple stretching brushes join see attached screenshot. Ironically if I take a bunch of narrow rectangles line them up and create a repeating brush it joins just fine.

+1 to the vector output improvements.

They seem somewhat finicky at the time, if a curve has too much swing the results are bitmap.
In the attached file, the 3rd braid yells a bitmap result.

Attachment 114467

Marc

Attachment 114466

Hi Marc,

Good example. Thanks.

The brush definition is quite wide because of the ribbon and so the inner edge loops back on itself because of the curvature of the line. You can see this if you turn view quality down to "Outlines with blend steps" (the second notch on the slider). When this happens it's difficult/impossible to represent the distorted shapes as vector information and so we output bitmaps.

Phil

Hi Phil,

Thanks for the explanation, I understand more how it works now.
Often it only takes a few tweaks to make a possible solution, but you have to know it.

Considering the nature of this behaviour, it could be interesting to see this curvature limit while editing the stroke in high view quality.
Otherwise it’s a bit of a shot in the dark. Maybe a tick box in the context menu.

I know I have made this statement quite a few times but could the team not develop the "Shape Painter Tool" to satisfy most of the suggestions made here about the vector output, transparencies, blending modes and the problem with tight corners. OK it's going to be a shape not a line and even with smoothing most times you would have too many nodes. If you use the Shape Painter tool you can also use the Eraser Tool to quickly edit your shape rather than using F4 (Shape tool). That would include most of what Frances would like to see from here from her list.

When I was working for the NHS doing loads of newsletters all with cartoons inside I ended up using AI for the cartoons because I always like to emphasise a varied line thickness to make the drawings look more hand drawn. Then I upgraded to Xara versions 11 and discovered that I could set a calligraphy type brush just by adjusting the angle and roundness settings. - I don't touch the softness settings at all.

About in May this year Gary B had got a thread going about what he would like to see in next version and he did raise the point about calligraphy type vector brushes missing so I pointed what could be achieved by the shape painter tool, pic included here. Like Bob states I am sure that the Xara team can produce simple styles of both calligraphy and grunge brushes maybe using some thing borrowed from the way the team incorporated the shape builder tool into Design Pro. There has been Frances also producing vector brushes and sharing the use of her brushes with all TG members but these are too smooth to look like a hand drawn line done by a pen/pencil.