Getting into Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo Week Two.

In my previous post some people were confused by me trying to replace both Photoshop and Illustrator with one app. Yep, Serif have two apps: Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer.

But I think most designers see Photoshop and Illustrator as interchangeable these days so most people will be able replace both with AD.

UPDATE: The Official Guide to Affinity Designer has just been released. I have yet to see it but it looks great.

There is a lot of excitement around Affinity 1.5... the smart resizing Constraint feature is a tool I would have killed for 2 years ago but what about creating sprites and game assets?

You can now export for Spine which is an amazing step in the right direction.

So this week I learned loads of new tips and tricks.

And let me stress that I am still fumbling with Affinity Designer and everything I do is sort of “arseways” as we say in Dublin.

I haven’t even gotten into using the Export Persona really so over the next few weeks you will hopefully see me streamlining how I use AD and becoming proficient at making all types of graphics including UI, Illustration, animation assets and logo stuff.

Day 1:

I needed to create some assets for animation in After Effects. There is no official workflow or export options for After Effects but neither has Illustrator really. I normally use a script to move each .ai element to a new layer. For this simple animation I just exported them manually.

Exporting the assets felt easier than PS. I hate Photoshop's dopey "Save for Web" dialog box. The animation was not made in Adobe After Effects not Affinity just to be clear. Maybe next year!

It's sort of unrelated to but here is me adding the Puppet Pins to the hand. I love that tool.

Day 2:

I created this “thinking Benji” sprite...completely arseways. But as you can see, I was able to rapidly tweak and flip and pose him as I went.

Day 3:

Nada.

Day 4:
Didn’t do anything for Big Bad Spanish AND I was forced into using Photoshop a few times to make edits to an old project. I’ve realised that for now I still need to boot up PS in the mornings.

Day 5...BOOM!!
Ah ha. I think I figured out how to make a sprite sheet in Affinity Designer! Also another massive leap was figuring out how to incorporate Symbols into character design/game assets. Hopefully I can share that next week.

Also got to play around in Affinity Photo for the first time. Loving it, being able to use the same file between the two apps is great.

I started a detailed non game piece using both Affinity Designer and Photo. First is tiny pencil sketch, then layouts in AD, then in AP I added a texture and roughed in some stuff before creating a detailed foreground in AD.

This pic is going to be epic.

Cheers,

Bob @clamnuts