appearsharmless

To Delete a handle on one side: Hold down alt and click once on the handle you want to delete (works with the node tool or when drawing with the pen tool) As far as locking the handles, with the Node tool, you can hold down Control and Shift and pull on one handle; that will make both handles move in sync. Is that what you're after?

... would make a great contest...😁

GarryP, Lagarto, Anon2, G13RL, thank you all very much. I would not have been able to figure out the problem, let alone the solution, myself. Besides saying thanks for this specific problem, I want to thank you all in general for all the help and work you do contributing to this forum. Your usernames are all very familiar to me; I've bookmarked dozens of your posts for reference. I have the Affinity workbooks and have watched all the videos, but having a squad of Graphics Sherlocks to bring our problems to is absolutely invaluable. So, again, thank you 🙏

I was playing around with a design for a poster using power duplicate, and got this odd result. My process was: 1) Move the transform point from the center of the original "eye" to the bottom. 2) Cmd + J 3) Move the duplicate to the right, align it with the original "eye", and rotate it 15º. 4) Power Duplicate until it made a circle. 5) Duplicate the circle, flip it horizontally, reduce the size and rotate it 10º. 6) Align and group the two circles, duplicate the group, reduce the new group, and power duplicate to (almost) infinity. I thought it might have something to do with the "lens flare" on the pupil (the only raster object), but I deleted that and tried again with the same results. Anyone have any idea what's happening (or, more likely, what I'm doing wrong)? Initial result: Zoomed detail: Eye_Problems.afdesign

You're welcome. You also might want to play around with the snap options on the context toolbar, especially when using the node tool to refine your drawn curves.

With the Pen tool still activated, hold down the Alt/Opt key and click on the handle you want to remove.

Try restarting your Mac in Safe Mode: Turn on or restart your Mac, then immediately press and hold the Shift key as your Mac starts up. Release the key when you see the login window, then log in to your Mac (this will take longer than usual). You might be asked to log in again. On either the first or second login window, you should see ”Safe Boot” in the upper-right corner of the window. Once it's completely done rebooting, restart your Mac normally, then see if the problem remains. That usually fixes it, and if it doesn't, there are other alternates you can try (but re-booting is Safe Mode is the easiest).

Ah ha! What threw me is that the "Selecting and aligning nodes" page isn't listed in the "See also" links at the bottom of the "Node Tools" page, or any of the "See also" links on those pages. I should have kept it simple and just done a global search for "node".

Hmmm... I can see where the behavior of the Windows version might be preferable. If you have the Color panel set to less than 100% opacity, and change H, S, or L, is a new swatch added to "Recent" on the swatches panel, reflecting that change? Can anyone on Windows confirm?

Thanks, Sean! Always nice to find out a suspected bug really is a feature (and a useful one at that). Is this documented anywhere in the help files? I thought I read through them with due diligence before posting...

If you mean the HSL wheel (or slider) opacity setting (not the brush opacity setting) reverts to 100% if you change H, S, or L, then yes, that happens on my Mac as well. But I would expect that behavior, as I'm effectively choosing a new color.

The following sure seems like a bug, but I've been unable to reproduce it: 1) In Designer/Designer Persona/"Object Creation" snapping enabled (plus "snap to object geometry" checked). 2) Used the ellipse tool to draw an ellipse (.25 stroke, no fill) then converted it to curves. 3) Option clicked on the North node to change it to a sharp/cusp node. 4) Instead, it added another node with a strange line next to the node I clicked on, and erased my history panel, leaving it empty except for "added lasso point". My biggest concern is how it erased all the document history; my biggest question is "What the heck is a 'lasso point'?" I looked up "lasso" and "lasso point' in the online Designer help and got bupkis.

It also works if you keep the lettering curves layer above the border layer and alt/opt click to add them (making a compound object). Weird.

Hmmm... I can hold down the spacebar and use the down-arrow key on my extended keyboard to flip through and view the different blend modes without seeing the selection. That said, I'm definitely in favor of a setting that would toggle the visibility of selections on and off 👍

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the questions: if I want to hide the selection while I'm moving an object, I toggle on the "eye" icon. If I want to hide the selection temporarily to see my design without the selection getting in the way, I just press the spacebar (on a Mac, at least).

An easy way to do this if you want to keep your spines and bristles pure vector is to use the pen tool: 1) Click once to lay down a sharp node 2) Click to lay down a second sharp node 3) Click back on the first node 4) Switch to the node tool and pull on the curve segments, handles, and nodes to adjust to your liking. bristle.mp4

Got it... yep, that makes it perfect. Thanks for untangling my personal Gordian Knot 👍.

Hmmm... when I drag on the sharp node with the Pen Tool it also changes the segment to the right of the sharp node (maybe I'm doing it wrong?). And you're right, adding the cmd key is completely unnecessary; thanks for pointing that out.

Your suggestion must have finally got my brain in gear. I figured out another workaround without leaving the node tool: Holding Command + Control while dragging the sharp/cusp node to displace it slightly will reveal it's handles without altering the adjacent node.

Yes! It's a bit of a clunky workaround, but it's much better then the micro-fiddling I had been doing. THANK YOU!

An annoyance I frequently run into is trying to adjust a cusp node adjacent to a smooth node. I'll have the smooth node dialed in (e.g., the example below shows both handles an equal length, and at the angle I want). When I pull on the segment between the nodes to obtain the control handles for the cusp node, the adjacent smooth node handle also moves, and I have to go back and fiddle it into place again. Is there any way to lock the adjacent node (or perhaps some other workaround? node_woes.mp4

Same issue on a Huion Inspiroy H610proV2, Driver 4.4.4.200417. The weird thing is if I undo and then try again with the mouse instead of the pen, it still doesn't work. I have to re-create the objects from scratch, and then it will work with the mouse.

On a Mac, you can use the colon/semicolon key to toggle snapping on and off.

Virtually all Affinity "vector" brushes just stretch or repeat a raster image along a vector path. The only two brushes that are pure vector are the first two brushes in the "Pen" category (you can tell these are vector because the bottom panel where you can set the head/tail offset of the raster image is blank). If you need pure vector brushes a few more were available in AD 1.6; they work in AD 1.8.3, and you can download them here.

Thanks, firstdefence. I, too, noticed they were pretty clunky to use... maybe that's why they weren't included in the 1.8 release? Let me add to my original post (which I made before I had my morning coffee, and it shows): Are the "Basic" category brushes from the AD 1.6 release pure vector? (i.e., will the strokes scale infinitely with no jaggies?)