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Thread: Affinity, thoughts?

  1. #1

    Discuss Affinity, thoughts?

    So, I haven't posted here in some time, but I'm bored working in Al Ain, Abu Dabi, I was on Reddit, and saw a comment chain that had a lot of mentions of this program Affinity. I'm just wondering if any of you folks have heard of it, and have used it in some capacity for map-making, and if so what, what were your thoughts? I'm looking into the program, but not a lot of map-making videos/tutorials on the internet (Youtube mostly) that I've seen. Just looking for thoughts on it and its usefulness in map-making.

  2. #2
    Guild Journeyer Yrda's Avatar
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    I haven't used Affinity "productively" yet for maps or anything else. But I'd say it is a software worth its price, especially since this is a one-time payment and no subscription. Of course if you are new to map making or drawing in general, there won't be as many tutorials for anything as there are for Photoshop, since that is around since so many more years.
    I'd recommend to try some basic tutorials first if you are new to the program, so you get to know the tools and where to find them. And then you might try following general map tutorials that were made for other software. You may have to find out how to solve certain challenges in Affinity other than PS, but you should be able to accomplish most tasks you need for a map.

    After all, it depends on your style anyway, if Affinity Photo or Affinity Designer is the right tool for you.

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    Professional Artist Tiana's Avatar
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    I don't think it's good for making maps on its own because some features it lacks, but it's good in accompanying another program. I use Affinity and Other World Mapper as part of my chain. I don't regret buying them, especially if you wait until Black Friday it will probably be half off.

    Let's look at features. Affinity Photo can now put text on a vector curve which is more powerful than Photoshop, unless that's changed since I last used it, but it doesn't have the hard bezel that some people use to make topographic mountains. It also won't let you chain a bunch of strokes together on a shape, or use a texture fill, both of which are very useful for mapping. So, you'll find making an echo outline a pain in the butt compared to Photoshop or Clip Studio Paint, you can't even do an expand-stroke the selection-expand-stroke the selection chain because of how their 'outline' works... it makes a selection mask of what you outlined instead. So I think you might have to make a shape with a gradient outline instead for the easiest way.

    Its batch processing is also different than Photoshop's. But it does have options that will work for things like say, having made a sheet of assets that you want to save separately, or running an action over an entire file folder of images.

    I am not a fan of its custom brush handling, and have never made cartography brushes in Affinity... I use Clip Studio Paint for the drawing part of my flow most of the time. There are a few exceptions but it just doesn't feel like a good program for painting in, inking and coloring sure, but not painting. Affinity Design is good if you want to make decorations with vector.

    The lack of a texture-to-layer fill does make it inconvenient for battlemap creation. I believe it has a form of a texture fill, but it isn't the same as making a saved texture fill / layer style in Photoshop... you have to open up a file each time to fill in that file as a bitmap fill.

    Anyway, it has its place. I'm glad I bought them. I use them often, just not for 100% of map making.

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