Warrennn

Yes, the problem is that no Ashlar products work on any version of macOS since Mojave, which is 3 years old. As far as I know, the apps are not even 64 bit, which is necessary for the most recent two Mac operating systems. Even though Ashlar has said that it will eventually support current macOS, my sense is that they are on the way out. I have been playing with viaCAD and am impressed with it. It has the same wonderful "drawing assistant" as the Ashlar products (the developer at Ashlar left the company and went to the people who make viaCAD and took his code with him). The app is much less expensive ($200 for the version I am using) and works well on an M1 Mac using the translator Rosetta2. It is certainly adequate to do what I want. The last time I looked, Ashlar Graphite, which is much less capable than viaCAD, cost $1500. The word is that Ashlar products will henceforth only be available via subscription, which is unacceptable to me. These products don't have the polish of Designer, but they do work well. Again, thanks for your help.

I received a response from Affinty and they confirmed that I am unable to do what I want using Designer. It is not that much of a hardship to use one computer running Designer for my 2D drawings and an older computer running a 3D CAD app for the 3D stuff. Again, thanks for your help.

Thanks for the suggestion. I will look at it, though I find $200 to be a fair price to pay for ViaCAD, with which I am very familiar.

Again, many thanks for all of your help on this. I think that the app is not intended to draw accurate 3D objects which can be rotated and transformed in other ways. My first (physics) book was illustrated using an expensive CAD program (Vellum) which I had ,used before I retired - it cost $1500 and was the newest version of a program which had won awards for its ease of use and elegance. As a retiree I was able to get it for $700 but it is not likely to be ported anytime soon to my new Mac and I didn't want to pay an exorbitant fee to get a compatible version (my understanding is that it will be subscription-based; I don't find this to be acceptable). Designer is a very elegant and beautiful program and I thought that with the introduction of isometric views that I would be able to use it for 3D. Unfortunately, that was not the case. There is another program, VIaCAD, which is based upon the Vellum drawing engine and costs $200, a reasonable price for a program which would work well for my needs. It is not as pretty as Designer but it does the job and I am familiar with its user interface (almost identical to Vellum's in most important ways). Thanks again!

A good example of what I would like to do is to create a cube using the isometric axes and rotate it around each axis (which is along the grid lines in each of the three planes). The rotated cube becomes very distorted as one rotates it - it simply does not look like a cube but some kind of parallelepiped. I thought that possibly the grid scale was different in each plane, but that was not the case. It is a mystery what happens under the rotations I am describing. I have sent a message to Affinity about this, but haven't received a reply.

GarryP, thank you for your help. Your drawing on the left looks correct. The arrow (W) pointing toward the upper left direction should be perpendicular to the plane of the circle and the circle should cross the vertical axis more or less where you drew it. The circle represents the path of the R vector as it "precesses" around the W vector in much way the axis of a gyroscope precesses around the earth's gravity (whose force is vertical). I had been formerly using Ashlar Graphite to draw these diagrams but I recently switched to an M1 MacBook Air and Graphite doesn't work on it. I have been using Designer and it works beautifully for all my 2D diagrams and is a pleasure to use. With the introduction of Grid and Snapping Axis panel, I thought I could do something in 3D using Designer. It appears that I really can't. h_d, I have been using the isometric grids to attempt my 3D drawing. It works fine when the circle is on the top, front or side planes. When I try to tilt the circle, it doesn't look right for some reason. Thanks for your suggestion.

Thanks for your suggestion, but I have looked at the linked pages and they didn't answer my questions. Here is the drawing I need. This was created in Ashlar Graphite which doesn't work on my new Mac (the company seems to not be doing well, from its website). I would like to duplicate the drawings in Designer. mag_prec_optical.pdf The three drawings are for a physics textbook and are illustrating something like nuclear magnetic resonance. The plane of the circles should always be perpendicular to the vector W which is tilted at various angles in the xz plane. I tried this using Designer where the three axes are drawn along lines in each of the three isometric planes: Top, front and side. It seemed to almost work, but the circle didn't look quite right - it appeared to be distorted. I started with a circle in the top plane and rotated it (together with the W vector) using the transform panel to get the three drawings. The W vector seemed to always be perpendicular to the plane of the circle when I did the rotations but the circle was distorted. Hope this helps. Again, thanks. The app seems very close to doing what I want - it would be nice to get it to work.

Thanks, that was a useful link but unfortunately, I am still having problems. I am guessing that there is no answer: Designer is strictly a 2D app and is not intended to construct general 3D objects or to transform the faux-3D objects drawn using the Isometric grid. It is a bit frustrating, since they are almost there - one can create 3D looking objects but not transform them properly, if I am not mistaken.

Hello, I am using Designer (on a Mac) to do some 3D line drawing. I set the grid to isometric and created 3 mutually perpendicular coordinate axes by selecting each of the three views (top, side and front) and drawing a line along the respective grid lines - all three lines meet at the same point (the origin) and in the viewing plane are about 120 degrees apart. I then created a circle in (say) the top plane and moved it so that the center was at the origin of the coordinate system,. I attempted to rotate the circle about the three axes, each one coinciding with a coordinate axis. It worked fine in the top plane (as expected, since it was created in the top plane) but in the other planes the perspective was completely wrong. For example, when I selected the side plane and rotated the circle so that its normal was along the axis created in the side plane, the circle was very distorted. Is there any way to do true 3D transformations (like rotations) using the isometric view? Thanks!

I have the same problem on a new M1 MacBook Air, which is not a slow computer. First load, 27 bounces on dock. Subsequent load, 2 bounces. If I wait a day or two it is back to 27 bounces (without an intervening reboot). I am using the "universal" version of the app (Arm+x86)

LaTeXiT allows you to save an image in .eps form after which is is easily imported into Designer. On the Mac, you can drag the .eps from the finder. Works great.

Thanks for the response. I will look for the civil engineering tutorials.

Hello, I was wondering whether anyone is using Affinity Designer for precision mechanical drawing or CAD? I have been playing with AD as a replacement for some fairly expensive CAD apps (mainly on the Mac) and am impressed with its capabilities in this area due mainly to its extensive snapping features and drawing guides. My interest is in making precise drawings of scientific apparatus for publication (mainly in books). I have formerly used Ashlar Graphite (on the Mac) for drawing and like it very much, but find it to be extremely expensive to maintain. I am also attempting to move my set of desktop publishing apps to the iPad. There are already two tolerable LaTeX typesetting apps on the iPad and I need to see whether AD can be fit into my workflow (using drag and drop and other iOS 11 features). If anyone is using AD for mechanical drawing, it would be nice to exchange tips and experiences. Thanks. wn

I am also a (retired) scientist (physics) and find Affinity Designer to be very useful for scientific documents (I would love to find a replacement for my current drawing program: Ashlar Graphite). I found a different approach to embedding LaTeX snippets - I create a pdf from the drawing app (in this case Designer) and drop it into OmniGraffle together with as many LaTeX snippets as I want (using LaTeXit). They can then be positioned and resized at will. This works very well and was used in a book I recently wrote. I realize it requires another app (OmniGraffle) and some additional steps but it is fairly straightforward. One can also use this technique with other apps, such as Igor Pro graphs. I make bare graphs and use LaTeXit for all the labeling, using OmniGraffle for the final layout (then make a pdf and use the \includegraphics command in TeXShop).