Brushes need more work

[angelize]

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.

[iamtheblues]

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.

[PhilM]

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

[iamtheblues]

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.

[PhilM]

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

[iamtheblues]

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.

[angelize]

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.

[MarcT]

+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.



Marc

Braids.xar

[PhilM]

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

[MarcT]

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.