Practically everyone couches their pet feature desire in terms of the "most fundamental, basic, must-have deal-breaker preventing my being able to do anything with Affinity," and "the one and only thing preventing my ceasing paying Adobe's extortion fees."
And I still say that emulating Illustrator is the last thing I want to see. I don't want "me, too"; I want better. No matter how long it takes.
The video of using an envelope distortion in Illustrator to apply a dimple texture to a bullet is a case-in-point, because its result is actually wrong, and not even marginally convincing.
The view of the bullet is obviously orthographic: a "side view." Therefore, drawn correctly (or at least convincingly), the circular centerlines of all of the rows of dimple dots would appear not as curves, but as straight lines; not just in the cylindrical portion of the bullet, but in its dome as well. (Think of latitude lines on a globe when viewed the globe is oriented such that its equator is viewed "edge on.")
In all of the rows, the dimples (and the spacing between them) would increasingly narrow in width as they progress toward either side. But in the warp result, they are of uniform width and are even wider than they are tall. In the dome portion, each dimple ellipse would also increasingly rotate depending on its elevation toward the top of the dome.
I'm not insulting Poptoogi's drawing here; I'm just making my point about feature requests. The video used to exemplify the "critical need" is an example of the classic "golf ball" projection problem:
Even Illustrator's 3D Effect feature cannot correctly map that texture to the half-sphere portion of the bullet, because 3D Effect's mapping onto a sphere always "pinches" the mapped artwork at the poles. But it gets worse: Even Illustrator's explicitly-named "fisheye" envelope also fails for this kind of commonly-needed distortion, resulting in a "squarish" distortion.
That's not because automation of such a distortion is impossible in a 2D program; I've automated it myself by use of simple 2D geometry in an AI JavaScript:
(This is not an envelope distortion, but an entirely different approach toward achieving more exactly and correctly what has been posited as an example of why envelope distortion is so "fundamentally" needed.)
I dare say if the functionality of that JavaScript were enhanced a little bit and implemented with a nice interface in a mainstream drawing program, it could end up being called the most "fundamental, basic, must-have deal-breaker preventing my being able to do anything with [any other program]."
That's all I'm saying: Set your goal higher than Illustrator. And be willing to wait for it. Because if you're not, we'll just end up with "me, too" functionality.
New-from-the-ground-up Affinity is the kind of opportunity that doesn't come along very often. Let's not squander it by demanding the mediocrity of Adobe Illustrator.
JET
