[Sneak peeks for 1.7]

Re: Area:

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…it would be very handy for optical compensation of uneven shapes…

Of course, visual appearance of "same size" is not just a simple matter of area (as any type designer knows), but it's at least a starting point for that, and useful for many other common things.

Personally, I've long maintained that every serious drawing program should provide path length and area as visible attributes (as, for example, ACD Canvas has for as long as I remember). If they were given, one could devise whatever calculation needed for use-specific purposes (especially given Affinity's more capable value fields).

The object model for Illustrator's JavaScript implementation includes area as a path property. So it's fairly trivial to write a JavaScript that will do whatever calculation you want that includes area as a factor. (I've used it in a few of my own AI Javascripts.) There are a couple of caveats; for example, the value shown is a simple sum of subpaths in a compound paths, regardless of winding order.

AI used to only provide path length (among other object values) in its hidden programmer's dialog which was accessed by an "Easter egg" keyboard shortcut. After  a period of user demand, path length was eventually exposed in its Document Info palette (a frankly rather half-baked grab-bag feature), when the Objects and Selection Only palette options are on.

JET

[Microsoft Windows Developer Awards 2018]

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Being me, I couldn’t help noticing the apostrophe missing from the contraction of the words “it is” in the description (“... whether its for marketing materials ...”)

A man after my own heart, Alfred.

JET

[Sneak peeks for 1.7]

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…some sort of lasso selection tool…

I've long maintained it would be less tedious and more accurate to simply provide a set of straightforward commands or buttons which allow the user to convert any ordinary path into a selection marquee or a cutting path (complete with appropriate contact-sensitive and select/subselect options). That way, any path drawing tool could be used, with all its accuracy advantages, instead of the conventional separate screen pixel-based marquee selection tool that:

• Makes it far too tedious to weave around the desired selection in tight circumstances (a very frequent problem when working with the disjointed polylines exported from CAD programs).
• Prevents being able to zoom in or out while making a selection.
• Wreaks havoc when the "lasso" comes into proximity of the screen edges, causing you to have to start all over.

I see no reason for separate functionally-limited "lasso" selection and "path cutting" tools, when the whole set of drawing tools could be used to perform both with more versatility.

Consider how ironic it is that conventional-wisdom vector drawing programs always resort to a clumsy screen-pixel tool for a so-called "lasso" tool, while Photoshop and similar raster imaging programs let you draw an accurate vector-based path and then convert it to a selection.

JET

[Sneak peeks for 1.7]

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…the tool(s) that create the dynamic shapes - such as Cog, Star, etc.

Since you mention that...

One of the most useful "shape tools" that would go hand-in-hand with the axo grids you're working on is a "threads" tools. For example, the one in Corel Technical Designer lets you simply drag to fill an ellipse with automatically trimmed half-ellipses to create a threaded hole. Huge time-saver.

Related: As I mentioned in one of the threads requesting a spiral too, ordinary "me, too" spiral tools are everywhere. But in both technical and general illustration, it's arguable that the need to draw a coil is actually more commonly needed than just yet another flat  "spiral." One of the oft-repeated threads in drawing software forums is "How do I draw a helix." And tech Illustrators need to draw springs just as often as they need to draw cogs.

Springs are tedious to draw manually. It's my most common use for the "path stretching" features ("Rubber Band Mode" in Corel Draw, or the "Reshape Tool" in Illustrator). But I see no reason why a live Spiral Shape tool shouldn't:

• Provide control for both uniformly and progressively-spaced coils.
• Allow the spacing of uniform coils to go all the way to zero, so that the path coils effectively lay exactly on top of each other.
• Provide endpoint handles that can allow the spiral to be "stretched" so as to serve as the centerline of a spring.

By way of example, here's a screenshot of my isometric springs "library" in Illustrator. Each of these was tediously derived by:

1. Drawing an ellipse.
2. Cutting the ellipse at one of its nodes.
3. Using the Reshape Tool to "stretch" the cut ellipse into a single "spiral" coil.
4. Storing the coil in the "side tile" of a Pattern Brush.
5. Drawing the end coils separately and storing them in the "end tiles."
6. Repeating that process for every 5° increment about an isometric ellipse.

You can imagine the tedium involved. But once done, each of the Brushes can be used to instantly create a spring of any diameter and any length. (And actually, of any bend, too; it's not just for tech illustration. I could use any one of the Brushes to draw a Slinky toy, for example.)

So in the above, I've used in non-obvious ways several features which many users consider the "high end" differentiators between ostensibly "professional" Illustrator and its competitors. But they're not really so "high end"; they're just needlessly cumbersome and not very well integrated.

I've done the same thing to create libraries of vector Brushes (or combinations of Brushes) to semi-automate drawing hex bolts, wires with terminals, wire rope, various kinds of chains, and more. Again, you can imagine the hours.

 

But I don't build such things in Illustrator anymore because I'm not going to continue to invest the effort in a program that I would have to rent (and which would thereby hold my own working files hostage). So I also do not share them, because I'm not really interested in promoting the use of Illustrator for the same reason.

Along similar lines, I've explored the related features in enough drawing programs to be convinced that such things and more could be accomplished more intuitively and more powerfully by a better-integrated set of more straightforward vector-based features, including:

• Path Ends (not just arrowheads)
• Path Strokes (repeating or stretched)
• Symbols (as ends or repeating along strokes)
• Graphic Styles
• Blends

As they say, "The devil is in the details." It's all about thoroughly and thoughtfully integrating the functionality between the features. For just one example, both Illustrator's Brushes and its Symbols are woefully debilitated by failure to abide by the option in the program's Transform palette to disallow scaling of stroke weights in the base artwork.

It's arguable that the piecemeal and standalone nature of such features in the very old programs is a consequence of their being added one at a time. I don't buy that, but Affinity's being new from the ground up should help avoid that "random grab bag" of functionality feeling of the long-in-the-tooth competitors.

Anyway, that's what I hope to see in Affinity.

JET

[Alignment of anchor points - Vote for this feature]

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+1 ... remember this feature from FreeHand -- highly useful.

And for those who had no experience with FreeHand: This ability is just one of many things which FreeHand had years before Adobe Illustrator. And even when it finally appeared in Illustrator, FreeHand's treatment was still more powerful.

It's one of my favorite examples of how ill-conceived fundamental elements of Illustrator's general interface (in this case, the simple principle of "selection") cascades upward through all of its features. Without going into detail, it boils down to the fact that Illustrator's interface doesn't "know" the difference between a path's being selected as an object, as opposed to having all its nodes selected. This stems, in part, from the infernal insistence on two separate selection tools.

In this case, the result is that FreeHand could perform all the same alignments and distributions on nodes as on whole objects. For example, in FreeHand, you can select all the nodes of a given path—or of multiple paths—and align them. Try that in Illustrator, and you'll find that you must deselect at least one node.

Thus, my automatic refrain: When building a better drawing program, Illustrator is not the program to emulate.

(By the way, FreeHand could also perform alignment or distribution of multiple pages (yet another major feature which Illustrator was decades late in providing) in the same straightforward fashion. The tedium of doing that in Illustrator, at least through version CS6, is laughable by comparison.)

JET

[Spiral Shape]

But as always, please give the Spiral Shape something beyond the "me, too" conventional-wisdom standard-fare: For example, a handle by which to "stretch" the spiral into the centerline of a coil:

JET

[Sneak peeks for 1.7]

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But, what else you can add to a blend tool?

First thing that comes to mind is an option to have the interpolated steps of a blend uniformly spaced along the length of its spine path, as opposed to their distribution always being subject to the curve handles.

Another is for it to correctly handle distribution along closed paths.

JET

[Sneak peeks for 1.7]

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Does 1.7 include global style feature?

Aaron,

You're on the right track in mentioning graphic Styles, but not sure what you mean by "global" styles.

Working with graphic Styles is what you need. But what's missing is a means by which to select all objects throughout the document to which a given Style has been applied (so that you can then simply apply another Style), or by which to edit or replace a Style by replacing its attributes with a differently-styled object (so that the edit automatically cascades to all object to which that Style is already applied). 

For me, that's one of many features which I hope the Affinity team is planning to do more thoroughly than, for example, Illustrator's small handful of "select same..." commands, which itself was a very weak answer to Macromedia FreeHand's extensive Graphic Find & Replace feature.

(Insert here my customary rant that Styles, Strokes, Brushes, Path Ends, and Symbols should not be a grab-bag of standalone features, but should all be thoughtfully integrated with each other.)  

JET

[Sneak peeks for 1.7]

Ben,

I apologize again for the length. I just want to be clear and thorough at the sacrifice of brevity, for the benefit of other interested forum participants.

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 …the naming of your axes…

My convention for XYZ labels of the iso axes is not entirely arbitrary. I simply label the vertical axis Y and the rightward axis X just to be generally consistent with the page rulers in 2D drawing and page assembly programs. This is also in keeping with the Cartesian orientation of the two scales attached to a drafting machine head. So that simply leaves the Z label for the leftward axis.

But various programs (both 2D and 3D) do it differently, and it's not really onerous to adapt. Regardless of the specific orientation, I much prefer a straightforward X, Y, Z labeling as opposed to ambiguous terms sometimes used ostensibly in the name of "intuition" (Left, Right, Top; Front, Side, Top, etc.), even for general illustration.

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The example you've given suggests to me that there are two parts to the rotation…the presentation transform (for example, the rotations that produce the standard Isometric grid)…that appears to be a constant for your whole design…and then there is the rotation of a component in the design relative to your logical coordinate system.

Yes. A complete solution needs to provide for two general rotational tasks. More simply put: establishing the coordinate system itself and "off-axis" rotations of object edges which are not parallel to the coordinate system.

If you provide for that much, you have at least simulated the process of drawing isometrically "on the board" in pre-computer days.

Off-axis rotation, however, includes two commonly needed situations, which I differentiate as "simple" versus "compound."

What I favor (and what you have already demonstrated in your last movie file) is a third capability which can actually make drawing "isometrically" in software radically more powerful than drawing on the board: The ability to re-orient the coordinate system on-the-fly. The point of this is that the coordinate system should not have to be, as you say, "a constant for your whole design."

So the operations needed for a complete solution are  fourfold:

• Initial Setup of the Axonometric Coordinate System
• Piecewise Simple Off-Axis Rotation (within the current coordinate system)
• Piecewise Compound Off-Axis Rotation (within the current coordinate system)
• Re-Orientation of the Coordinate System for major sections of the drawing

Those four operations can be thought of as corresponding to "stages" or "levels" of supportive functionality as far as current 2D drawing software goes. (They can actually be performed in any mainstream 2D Bezier-based drawing system if the user is well-versed in the principles, but they are seldom and weakly overtly or expressly supported (if at all) in most programs:

Stage 1. Providing Axo Grids: As already in Designer 1.6. This is significantly less functional than DrawPlus. But because the feature can automatically generate correct orthographic proportion between three perpendicular planes, even this is at least far better than:

• Programs that merely provide rectangular page grids (e.g., Adobe Illustrator)
• Programs that merely provide a "faux isometric" 2:1 aspect-ratio grid (e.g., Xara Designer Pro)
• Programs that merely provide a basic isometric grid (e.g., Inkscape)

Giving this a cube interface as in your last screen recording makes it more intuitive and "friendly" for any other general illustration purposes. But if the main point of my previous post (rotating about each axis) were implemented, just a few thoughtfully selected pre-defined defaults which can be selected from a menu (or even a set of icons) would be plenty for a starting point. A selection something like:

• Iso Bird's Eye
• Iso Worm's Eye
• Dimetric Top Favoring
• Dimetric Bottom Favoring
• Dimetric Sides Favoring
• Trimetric Top Favoring
• Trimetric Bottom Favoring
• Trimetric Left Side Favoring
• Trimetric Right Side Favoring

That is would be not at all limiting because even at the beginning of a drawing, nothing would prevent the illustrator from "fine tuning" any of those orientations by incrementally rotating the proxy cube about any of its the three axes.

Stage 2. Providing Interactive Off-Axis Simple Rotation: This was demonstrated by your rotating star video clip. This moves toward the functionality of DrawPlus, which otherwise in the realm of mainstream 2D Bezier-based drawing programs (at least to my knowledge) is only provided in much more expensive Corel Technical Designer. (I assume TechDesigner's Projected Axes feature could be fairly easily added to Draw, and should have been long ago.)

At first blush, (as evidenced early-on in this thread), this "live connection" between a piece of the artwork and one of the grid-defined "planes" appears to just be all about merely putting flat artwork onto the three perpendicular planes of a box (which, unfortunately, is all that some think isometric drawing is).

While that's certainly a great and useful feature for illustration in general, its greater implication for axonometric drawing is more subtle: To an isometric illustrator, it's not just about rotation on one of the planes. It also constitutes the most basic use of an elliptical protractor; finding correctly angled and scaled rotation about the axis which is not even on that plane.

Now, in truth, just the Pie option of Affinity's Ellipse Tool alone effectively constitutes a serviceable elliptical protractor if one knows how to use it as such. And by the same token, it's also fairly trivial to effectively "project" (distort) artwork drawn "in the flat" onto any axonometric plane by means of a "manual" rotation and scale transformation. But the "live" (interactive) aspect, of course, makes such things quicker and more intuitive, and adjustable, as software should. (Suppose, for example, you need to construct a set of wheel spokes or a radiator fan in correct geometry relative to your axis setup.)

Stage 3. Providing Interactive Off-Axis Compound Rotation: This is not provided by your rotating star video clip. When drawing "on the board," that unassuming little piece of plastic called an isometric protractor was not just used for finding drawn lengths and angles rotated about a single axis. It also serves (albeit in two steps) to construct compound rotations—rotations about two axes—which, as you noted, can define any rotation in 3D space.

An isometric protractor template goes even beyond that. A good one has printed along its major diameter an odd-looking, rather esoteric scale which provides something else very commonly needed in conjunction with off-axis compound rotations:  the correct "angle" (aspect ratio) of an ellipse which is "pierced" by the off-axis line.

This (so far) is the "stage" of functionality missing in the peeks at the developing interface. Stage 2 and Stage 3 combined correspond to what you referred to as "the rotation of a component in the design relative to your logical coordinate system" and what I refer to as "compound off-axis rotation." It corresponds to the purpose of the "Unit Sphere" in the mockup I sent you and of my Flash-based tool; an interactive "spherical protractor":

Stage 4. Providing for On-The-Fly Reorientation of the Coordinate System.  This is what your last movie file demonstrates. Its interface treatment, however, is the element about which I have the greatest misgivings so far, because a more intuitve treatment of this would make available and immediately intuitive a concept widely misunderstood by begining and experienced axonometric illustrators alike: The fact that isometric, dimetric, and trimetric are not three arbitrarily "disconnected" conventions. When done right, they are in fact entirely geometrically compatible and can therefore be used to advantage even within the same drawing.

This (given the main edit I suggested in my previous post) is what would really take the solution far beyond competing attempts. But thinking of it as "a constant for your whole design" is a step backward. Completely re-orienting the whole coordinate system for every single piecewise off-axis roation (stages 2 and 3) would be tediously cumbersome. But doing it for significant contiguous portions of the whole drawing (as in my motorcycle example) would be hugely advantageous.

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I don't know - what do you think?  I know how I'd want to visualise it, but that might not be the same as you?

Provision for what I've described as Stage 3 and a modification of Stage 4 would put this feature set in a class of its own, far ahead of any of the half-baked piecemeal features provided in any of the mainstream 2D drawing progams. One way to do that might be:

To Provide Stage 3 Functionality: Provide a Unit Sphere widget or tool. This would basically consists of the functional equivalent to three "Pie" ellipses (and a little bit of on-screen "cues" for interactivity and intuitiveness) which, when invoked, appears at the cursor location (if a tool), or on the page (if a widget, perhaps stored as one of the default Smart Shapes objects). In either case, it conforms to the current grids orientation (if any) when it appears. Otherwise it appears in isometric orientation.

Referring roughly (at least in principle) to my screenshot above, a handle circle would appear at the intersection of, say, the X axis and the "equator" ellipse. Its movement is constrained along the ellipses it encounters, and is followed by a "ghost" ellipse guide (the grey ellipse in my image) indicating the current "latitude," which also serves as a drag guide. Cursor readouts (two values) appear during the drag, indicating rotation about the constraining horizontal ellipse (i.e., "longitudinal" angle) and about the constraining vertical ellipse (i.e., "latitudinal" angle). Throughout the process, a radius line between the sphere's center and the cursor is displayed, along with an ellipse which is "pierced" by the radius. On mouseup, that radius becomes a normal single-segment path, and its "thrust ellipse" becomes a normal Pie Ellipse. A prompt appears in which to enter the true-measure length of the radius (and major diameter of the thrust ellipse).

To Improve Stage 4 Functionality: This would be just as explained in my previous post: Modify the interface so as to provide interactive and numeric rotation of the proxy cube about each of the three axes, instead of about just one axis and a "pitch" thumbwheel" as in your movie file.

Something I did not make clear in my previous post is that I would not expect re-orienting the overall gridset (the cube) to have to be so elaborate as to maintain object-specific "links" to the planes of the previous original cube orientation. That is, once I reached the steering stem in the motorcycle example, and decided to re-orient the axonometric coordinate system to more directly assist in construction of the front assembly, I would consider it fine if previously drawn objects were to become "flattened" regarding their "live" connection to the previous coordinate system. Again, the concept I'm trying to convey is that changing the overall coordinate system would be powerfully useful. But it should be used to facilitate drawing significant areas of the drawing, not to perform each and every piecewise rotation (which are typically many in real-world use). I'm not expecting this to act like 3D modeling, but like the long-established discipline of 2D axonometric drawing which is all about referencing the axes, for not just linear measures but rotations also; and not about freely twirling a "virtual trackball."

Something functionally equivalent to this approach would be vastly more intuitive in real-world use than having to mentally "step back" and imagine what combination of rotation about Y and overall elevation (values from two different manipulation metaphors) are needed to, for example, "Rotate the toy tank's muzzle 15 degrees about X and then rotate it and the turret 65 degrees about Y." Those are the terms in which the illustrator is thinking when drawing axonometrically. He is not thinking in terms of tilting and rotating the whole coordinate system for every piecewise off-axis rotation.

I'd like to suggest a detail modifications to the cube-based interface:

Unless it represents some other not yet explained functionality, I don't really see the value of the smaller inner cube. I would much rather see an ellipse displayed on each face of the large cube. One of the most common errors in axonometric illustration is disproportion between ellipses and axial measures. Without going into more detail here, It has to do with the issue that was commonly (and awkwardly) described as "isometric drawing" as opposed to "isometric projection." The error is just as easy to commit in software as it is on the board (if not more so).

Again, thanks for your work and attention to detail (and patience), and sorry for the length.

JET

[Sneak peeks for 1.7]

On ‎3‎/‎8‎/‎2018 at 9:25 AM, Ben said:

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This is used to define the grid axes - their direction and length - based on a parallel projection of a rotated cube.

 

This is pretty exciting, Ben!

I'm confident that once this is in final form, Affinity users and other vector-based illustrators who have heretofore only occasionally dabbled in isometric drawing will soon find out how it can richly enhance their marketable skill sets (and something they've been missing in competing programs).

A "proxy cube," of course, is probably the most immediately intuitive interface for visualizing a set of three geometrically proportional axonometric grids. So interactively setting grids by means of such a diagram is much more approachable for those not yet acquainted with figuring out the values needed to do the same in the current Grids and Axes dialog.

In an engineering department in which I once worked, someone posted a sign which read:

"In the history of any design project, a point is inevitably reached at which it becomes necessary to shoot the Engineers and begin production."

So I know at some point you have to nail down an interface's approach. But I hope you don't mind some further suggestions toward what I consider a very important aspect:

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...you can use this feature to define a notion of "up" by fixing the Elevation angle (and the Roll angle, which normally you'd just leave as 0).

If one assumes "up" is always vertical on the page, any axonometric orientation can be described in two terms which I call "Spin" and "Tilt." (Think of Spin as corresponding to a rotated "top view" from which to project horizontal measures downward into the axo view, and Tilt as a rotated "side view" from which vertical measures are projected leftward into the axo view.)

Spin and Tilt correspond to yaw and pitch, respectively, and in your GridCube movie to dragging the blue axis and the "elevation thumbwheel".

My suggestion is that Roll (of roll, pitch, and yaw) is functionally unnecessary, because it is equivalent to merely rotating the whole illustration (rotating all three axes the same amount at once) on the page after it is finished, and doing that is trivial. (I do understand that may be useful in the context of just rotating an angular grid for the purpose of flat graphic design of a page layout.)

In the context of axonometric illustration, though, here's why it's a big deal:

In the real world of axis-measured drawing, yaw and pitch (with or without the unnecessary roll) are appropriate for initially establishing the orientation of the overall coordinate system. But once that's done, the process of actually drawing the objects within that coordinate system begins, and roll, pitch, yaw relative to the line-of-sight is not needed and having to reference it is actually quite cumbersome.

By way of example, suppose we're drawing a motorcycle isometrically:

The motorcycle as a whole is oriented from the isometric upper right rear perspective. The centerline of the whole bike's length is parallel to the right diagonal axis (which I customarily designate X). The rear wheel's axle is parallel to the left iso diagonal (which I call Z).

1. Suppose we start drawing parts at the "near corner" of the isometric bounding box: the tail light of the bike, and proceed forward in the "distance."
2. Since motorcycle details are not really very "boxy" in shape, we very soon encounter plenty of off-axis object edges (rear wheel spokes, for example) which are not parallel to the X or Y axis, but are rotated upon the plane defined by the X and Y axes; in other words, edges rotated about the Z axis.  Such rotated measures are pretty easily accomplished by use of a protractor on the XY plane--essentially the same functionality demonstrated by your earlier rotating star. ( I call this "simple rotation"; rotation of a line about one axis.)
3. Everything progresses reasonably well--until we reach the motorcycle's steering stem. Its centerline is tilted, let's say, 22 degrees counter clockwise from vertical (so as to "rake" the front suspension).  So drawing the centerline of the steering stem post itself is just another simple rotation upon the XY plane (rotation about the Z axis).
4. But further suppose the handlebars are not pointing the front wheel directly forward. They are turned, say, 20 degrees rightward. This means the whole front assembly and everything attached to it is rotated 20 degrees. That front assembly is not 20 degrees about the vertical Y axis, nor 20 degrees about the line-of-sight. It is rotated 20 degrees about the centerline of the steering stem, and that's what the illustrator is concerned with. Roll, pitch, and yaw of the coordinate system, relative to the line-of-sight, is of no help.

What I've described is the thought process of the illustrator: "The centerline of the steering stem is rotated 22 degrees about the Z axis. The handlebars are then turned 20 degrees about the steering stem's centerline."

This is what I term a "compound rotation"; rotation about two axes (or about one axis and an already rotated object edge) and is also a common need in axonometric illustration.

The illustrator is not thinking in terms of whatever combination of Tilt (the elevation thumbwheel) and Roll (the interactive flat protractor which is parallel to the page) is needed in order to accomplish the appropriate trimetric orientation which would best expedite drawing the front assembly according to measures. Nor should he have to.

In the GridCube movie, you demonstrate dragging the blue axis, but not the green or red axes. Dragging in the orthogonal protractor surrounding the whole cube is not the same thing as rotating about the green (or red) axis, which is what the illustrator may need to do.

The solution is simple: The same kind of rotation you are providing by dragging the blue axis just needs to be provided for the other two axes as well. And a numeric rotation value field needs to be provided for each.

Starting over, the process then would be as follows:

1. The illustrator selects from a reasonable collection of isometric, dimetric, or trimetric presets (no doubt usually isometric) to establish the desired overall coordinate system.
2. Illustration commences from the rear of the motorcycle, drawing object edges parallel to all three axes, working forward. Given the overall configuration of a motorcycle, most of the construction work is probably on the XY plane.
3. The illustrator reaches the rear wheel axle. Because the proportions of the coordinate system axes is automatically ensured, drawing the extrusion of the axle length is easy; it's just a direct measure parallel to the Z axis.
4. But each spoke of the rear wheel is rotated to a different angle upon the XY plane, and the foreshortened length of each must be correctly determined. That, too, is easy, by drawing a polygon or star (as exemplified in your earlier demo) which has the same diameter as the wheel rim and using it as an "elliptical protractor." Better still, by taking advantage of another of Affinity Designer's benefits: The Pie behavior of a live ellipse, with its user-defined start and end points effectively is an interactive elliptical protractor.
5. So drawing continues to progress toward the front of the bike, and the steering stem is reached. It needs to be "raked" 22 degrees counter-clockwise about the Z axis. Again, the diameter of an ellipse can be used to determine the correctly drawn angle and length of the steering stem. But the illustrator knows the whole front assembly is coming up, so instead...
6. The illustrator opens the proxy cube dialog and rotates the cube 22 degrees about the Z axis. This automatically makes the Y axis parallel and proportional to the steering stem's centerline.
7. Still in the Grids interface, the illustrator similarly rotates the cube 20 degrees about the now changed Y axis. The whole grid system has now been re-oriented to be of most efficient benefit to drawing the whole front assembly.
8. The illustrator now continues to draw the entire front assembly just as easily as he used the initial preset orientation for the frame of the bike before reaching the tilted steering stem.

At any point, the orientation used for the front assembly can be saved as a user-defined, document-specific preset. So the illustrator can (more realistically) switch back and forth between that orientation and the initial preset at will.

What the illustrator has done, whether realizing it or not, is seamlessly and fluidly integrate isometric and trimetric methods within a single drawing, and without having to do any tedious calculations and minimal off-axis constructions.

I hope the above makes it clear that providing numeric input and interactive widget control for rotation about each axis is far more important, useful, and intuitive while actually drawing three-dimensional objects than using a "roll, pitch, yaw" metaphor relative to the line-of-sight.

There would be nothing wrong with the widget providing both roll, pitch, yaw interaction and rotations about the three axes. But the latter is far more important, and can also be used to perform the purpose of the former.

In other words, at the risk of being repetitive, the illustrator is only thinking in terms of Spin and Tilt (i.e., roll, pitch, and yaw) when establishing his overall orientation for the whole drawing. That's established once-and-done up-front. But throughout the course of actually drawing his subject, the illustrator is thinking about sequential rotations about the axes, just as he is thinking about linear measures along the axes. In axonometric (axis based) drawing, both rotations and linear measures are relative to the axes.

For anyone familiar with it, this is a primary problem of Adobe Illustrator's similar-looking 3D Effect dialog. It does, in fact, provide for dragging any edges of its proxy cube so as to rotate it about the corresponding axis. But just try using it in conjunction with its provided numeric input fields. Those fields are not axis-based; they reference the "roll, pitch, yaw" of the invisible "virtual trackball", which is mostly useless for axonometric drawing beyond just establishing an initial overall view orientation.

(Also, to hopefully avoid any confusion which may stem from my mention of 3D Effect: As has been explained several times in this thread, the subject Affinity feature is entirely and appropriately a 2D construct, whereas AI's 3D Effect is a severely limited "standalone" subset of a discontinued fairly rudimentary 3D modeling program--Adobe Dimensions and its predecessors--the primary value of which was that it rendered to 2D vector-based paths instead of the usual raster images. So while its purpose is entirely different, my comparison is nonetheless valid in the context of using what I call a "proxy cube" for the interface, which itself is neither unique nor original to Adobe Illustrator.)

JET

[Sneak peeks for 1.7]

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This is what I am talking about:...

The Vanishing Point Filter in Photoshop is similar in concept, in that it is a 2D construct and it allows you to drop flat artwork onto and rotate it upon a grid to simulate a surface. Its' an elaboration of what you could do in Photoshop with the Free Transform tool, prior. But again, it is all about raster imaging, not vector artwork. And as you can tell from its name, its intention assumes converging perspective, not parallel perspective.

Moreover, though, as I said earlier:

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The capability proven by the [rotating star] demo is useful in itself for..."sending" the logo to the various planes...[and]...rotating it as needed on those planes. But its ramifications are much larger.

But the real power represented by the rotating star is in how it will play into empowering an illustrator to "draw directly into" a parallel perspective view of objects which are not so conveniently "boxy" in shape and neatly aligned parallel to each other.

 

An interactive axonometric grid feature facilitates axonometric construction, which is about much more than just distorting a flat image to look like it's on a flat surface of a box. It assists you in drawing objects of all kinds of shapes with mechanically-correct proportion. For example, the samples below are all about drawing "directly into" isometric viewpoints. Very little of it is about dropping objects drawn "in the flat" onto boxy surfaces:

 

JET

 

[Sneak peeks for 1.7]

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Doesn't Adobe Photoshop have this feature where you create meshes/grids and images stick to it in proper perspective?

If you are talking about Photoshop's 3D features, this is an entirely different thing.

This is entirely 2D; there is no actual 3D modeling going on.

This is entirely vector-based drawing; there is no raster imaging involved at all in the example sketch. The Lookin' UP graphic consists entirely of normal Bezier paths on all the "surfaces" shown. It's just copies of the graphic at lower left that have been transformed using regular—but somewhat automated—2D transformations (rotate, scale, skew). The copies of it on the billboard are just as normally editable as the original.

This is not painting a raster-based texture and mapping it onto the surface meshes of a 3D model.

This is about using a 2D grids feature and live 2D transformation features in software to help facilitate a 2D axis-based drawing discipline which dates back to long before computers, just as traditional "vanishing point" perspective construction methods also long predate computers, and are facilitated in some 2D drawing programs.

JET

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I miss Freehand everyday. Simple UI and speedy performance.

The most telling detail of FreeHand's elegance was its selection and path manipulation interface. Illustrators who never used it just don't realize that its single selection tool did more—and did it more intuitively and efficiently— than any program with the now pandemic separate node selection tool. The insistence on two separate main selection tools is so ingrained due to Illustrator's market dominance that I fear most users will never know how much better it could be.

I knew FreeHand's demise was immanent as soon as Macromedia added the completely useless white pointer, just to appease Illustrator users. (It was literally just that. It wasn't until the very last version that the white pointer actually gained any ability in FreeHand that couldn't be done with the black pointer; and even that was a token detail, unworthy of a separate tool.)

Nonetheless, up to that point, FreeHand underwent marvelous advancements while under Macromedia's control. A huge one was its complete interface rebuild to an Inspector-based one. Everything you needed to know about the current selection was visible and settable in the efficiently designed Inspector. No drawing program's attempt at so called control panels and object attributes ribbons has come close to the efficiency of FreeHand's Inspector palette. Once again, Illustrator's schizophrenic attempt—which can't seem to figure out if it's a tool options bar or an object attributes bar or a commands bar—wins worst-of-class.

(Ironically, FileMaker Pro—a relational database management program, of all things—comes close with the comprehensive Inspector palette of its Layout Mode interface.)

My nostalgia is not rose-colored glasses, though. Even when FreeHand was in its hey day, I was quite vocally bemoaning the fact that the interfaces of all the Bezier drawing programs (including FreeHand) were actually more analogous to a mere "line up table" or "paste up table" (a glorified light table with a T-square, used for flat design, stripping film, etc.) than to a proper drawing table equipped with a Mutoh track drafter (used for illustration). It was so refreshing when FreeHand's full-blown Perspective Grids feature appeared. I wonder how few know the one in Adobe Illustrator is a direct copy of it; just one of those things for which Adobe gets the credit by merely acquiring it from elsewhere, and very belatedly adding it to Illustrator. And though I sung its praises when it first appeared in FreeHand, I was deeply disappointed that they had chosen to address converging perspective before parallel perspective, which I think is arguably more amenable to 2D drawing programs by its nature.

Still today, with few exceptions, almost everything in a "drawing" program's interface is tyrannically oriented toward the horizontal and vertical. When drawing, an Illustrator couldn't care less about the page edges. An illustrator is thinking in terms of the spatial orientation and angular view of the subject being drawn. When you really think about it, we are usually struggling against the conventional-wisdom features when trying to draw real-world things. After over thirty years of ostensibly "rocket fast" computer and software development, little has really changed from that in the 2D drawing genre.

That's why I find it so refreshing whenever I see a feature explicitly designed to support illustration in a mainstream Bezier drawing program, like Affinity's axonometric grids. Axonometric is a particular passion with me, because it's such an elegant system. It's so neat to watch your constructions just come together and fit perfectly together throughout the drawing with geometric accuracy equal to that of mechanical drafting. And especially today its application is far broader for commercial illustration than commonly assumed. I blame the misconception on decades of neglect, both in software and in general art classes.

By the way, I never had a FreeHand file fail to RIP. In the days of slower processors and early PostScript, too many users indiscriminately built their files using all kinds of willy-nilly, sloppy, convoluted constructs without a thought beyond on the monitor appearance, thereby effectively begging for output problems. Such problems occurred with all graphics applications. CorelDraw gained an undeserved bad reputation in that regard, largely just because it was so feature-rich. Too many users still do the same today, but the output systems have become much more forgiving in terms of error handling.

For one example, back then stray points (single-point paths) could cause output problems, and Adobe Illustrator (precisely because of its awkward selection interface) is the program most prone to inadvertently creating stray points.

JET

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But that's even worse because you have to read them.

Egads!

It tickles me how often in the Illustrator User Forum, users struggling to get their heads around its convoluted interface so often say they are "visual learners." Every time it makes me think, "Um...you do realize you are reading the answer you just thanked me for, right?"

But seriously, since the early days, I have made it my habit (and advice to beginners) to start by not just reading through the manual start-to-finish, but actually work through the operations it describes as you go. In the end, that is so much faster than asking random "how to" questions in online forums or watching videos because it is, first, accurate (amateur videos and answers in online forums are so often just cases of the blind leading the blind) and, second, more thorough. Plus, actually sitting at the computer with the manual and playing with the functions as they are described removes most of the painful boredom, and encourages experimentation in a sensible sequence in the learning process, as opposed to struggling with operations as they happen to occur at random.

 

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This is AWESOME!!

I suspect it's already occurred to you, Befehr, but...

Create a cylindrical extrusion along the Y (vertical) axis in isometric:

1. Ellipse tool: Drag an ellipse onto the page.
2. Transform palette: Set its width (major diameter) to the true measure of the circle it represents. Set its minor diameter to "w*sin(35.26)".
3. PenTool: Line Mode. Mousedown on the center of the ellipse and shiftDrag any arbitrary distance upward.
4. Transform palette: Set the 9-point proxy icon to one of the bottom points and set height to "[true measure length of the cylinder] * cos(35.26)".
5. CopyDrag the ellipse by its center and snap to the top of the centerline.

(Yeah, you could have just moved  a copy of the ellipse vertically by the cosine of the iso angle, but in the real world, it's usually advantageous to draw centerlines of extrusions.)

Beyond that:

1. Select one of the ellipses.
2. Click the Pie button.

You now have an interactive isometric protractor for finding correct measures of off-axis lengths rotated about the Y axis. Just key the needed angle(s) in the Start and End fields.

Get accustomed to this and you can easily start thinking "Who needs grids?"  

JET

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Adobe is the industry standard because they showed up first...

Actually, in those years, Adobe Illustrator (1987) and Aldus FreeHand (1988) were practically simultaneous, given that FreeHand's drawing engine was largely based on its progenitor, Altsys Fontographer (1986). Right out the gate, FreeHand surpassed the functionality of Illustrator (Illustrator could not even "edit in preview mode"; you had to switch to "outline mode" to edit paths), and Illustrator continued to  trail years behind FreeHand's functionality throughout their competitive history.

Having lived through all that (my first hands-on exposure to Bezier drawing being Fontographer on a Mac Plus), I simply attribute Adobe's dominance to the fact that it created PostScript. That's what made it the "household word." All the buzz of the "desktop publishing revolution" was about "Adobe PostScript." So anything with the Adobe brand on the box was considered the "safe bet."

JET

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I still want Serif to have tools that other apps have though cough knife cough warp /distort cough.

Sure. We all do. And I'm confident all that is coming. But that doesn't mean they have to be implemented in the same conventional-wisdom "me, too" way, or that I want them to be. I'm as eager as anyone, precisely because I highly desire more innovative thought being applied to even such seemingly mundane capabilities. I'm in a hurry, but not for yet another look-same, do-same program. I already have a slew of those.

One of my favorite cases-in-point is Affinity's value fields. Long before most programs like cough Adobe Illustrator cough figured out that it runs on a computer, a precious few other programs like  cough Macromedia Freehand cough enabled its users to key a math expression directly into its value fields instead of having to turn away from the $1000 computer to open a drawer and drag out a $10 pocket calculator. It was years later that Illustrator caught on, but as of CS6 (the last version available without a rental contract), that capability is still limited to a single kind of math operator (multiplication-division or addition-subtraction, but not multiplication and addition in the same expression, or parentheses).

Spunky Affinity comes along and, right off the bat, betters FreeHand and pretty much all others in the Bezier drawing software category by letting us enter trig functions into value fields. And that plays quite handily into the feature being discussed. Here's how:

Those familiar with the ubiquitous plastic ellipse templates used in mechanical drafting since long before drawing software came along know that the cutouts on those templates are labeled not in terms of height and width (as mainstream drawing programs universally do), but in terms of angle. Why? Because a 25° template has elliptical cutouts which are correctly proportioned to represent a circle which is tilted 25° degrees from the viewer's (and the illustrator's) line-of-sight.

Now, which of those is of most value to an illustrator? "Height and width" may be of value to a designer making a pleasing page layout, but it's pretty useless to an illustrator thinking about the orientation of a circular part of his subject in space.

So you want a 25° ellipse in Affinity? Just key "1" in the width field and "sin(25)" in the height field. That one simple direct unsung capability puts affordable Affinity light years ahead for anyone interested in using their software for mechanically-correct drawing. And as the grids/axis feature becomes functionally enhanced, these two seemingly separate features don't just stand alone, but further empower each other—again, the very definition of functional elegance.

That kind of feature implementation is what used to be called functional elegance; a driving principle in the early days of graphics software, but one which seems to have been long forgotten by the monolithic software vendors. A designer not needing to think of ellipses in terms of tilt angle can just enter height and width values as common. And beginners intimidated by such a capability can work as usual without stumbling over it (or even being aware of it) until they have the need.

I can easily imagine that if Adobe Illustrator ever gains this long overdue practical capability, it will be rolled out with fanfare rivaling New Year's Eve in New York and a clever Adobe-esque name (LiveSmartAngledEllipses!), as if Adobe invented the sine function—and many Illustrator-only devotees will be convinced it did, just as they seem to believe Adobe invented multiple pages and the concept of a 2D converging perspective grid, and will have its own separate "Tool" given predominate space in the already over-crowded main tool bar, right beside the all-important "Lens Flare" tool.

So Affinity Team, please do take your time. Just hurry up about it.  

JET

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Is this [rotate on plane demo] a new thing or something already existed in another program (you know what program i mean)?

I don't know what program you're alluding to. (You know you can just say it, right? Don't worry; just change your hair color and wear a hood when you go out.)

Similar ability to do what was shown in the demo clip does exist in a few other 2D drawing programs, but not, for example, in Adobe Illustrator which (at least as of CS6) doesn't even provide for creating non-rectilinear page grids at all. In case you're thinking of Adobe Illustrator's 3D Effect plug-in, that's an entirely different thing that shouldn't be confused with the subject of this thread. (And even 3D Effect doesn't let you perform that kind of transformation "live" on the page.)

 

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And how do you make a tilted plane?

This is all 2D. So there is no actual "tilted" plane in the sense of a 3D model. There is just an on-page grid which effectively constitutes a drawing of a tilted plane. You can already do that in Affinity Designer:

1.  View Menu: Grid and Axis Manager
2. Turn off the Use automatic grid checkbox
3. Click the Advanced mode button
4. Select the Isometric or one of the Dimetric or Trimetric presets from the Grid Type popup menu.

That alone is a far more capable grids implementation than is provided in the majority of mainstream 2D vector drawing programs.

The point of the demo, though, is that Ben has been working on adding some functional geometric association between the grid and on-page objects. The live-shape Star object has been "sent" (using DrawPlus's term) to a "plane" (grid) as you would often want to do in a 2D parallel perspective drawing with something like a logo. But its association is not just a done-and-over-with 2D transformation. The association is still "live" so that Ben can just drag the familiar rotation handle of the Star object's bounding box and effectively "rotate it upon the plane" defined by that grid.

And yes, there are a few programs which can do that, too. My two favorite examples are at opposite extreme ends of the price spectrum: Serif DrawPlus, using its 3D Planes feature, and Corel Technical Designer, using its Projected Axes feature. (In fairness, there are other reasons for the price difference.)

But the fleshing out of this feature set in Affinity Designer is a huge functional advantage over all the current mainstream 2D drawing programs. It constitutes explicit support for an entire drawing discipline that is just as appropriate for 2D drawing programs—and for commercial illustrators—as converging perspective. It's frankly rather laughable that over three decades after the "desktop publishing revolution" of the mid-80s that such things are still almost entirely neglected by the monolithic 2D drawing programs.

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Can't you do this in a flat persepctive first and then use warp/distort tool (when it came out) to then make it not flat?

As mentioned earlier in this thread, this is (so far) about parallel perspective (based on parallel axes), not converging perspective (based on vanishing points). That's why Affinity's grids feature is appropriately called the Grids and Axes Manager.

The whole purpose and intent of "axis-based" (axonometric) drawing—of which isometric is just the most common variation— is to be able to draw "directly into" a mechanically-correct perspective view. The whole idea, dating back hundreds of years, is to not have to draw everything first as rectilinear side views (like traditional drafting) and then construct the desired perspective from those.

So in this sense, while the rotatable star screen grab demonstrates one of the "building block" capabilities, it does not demonstrate the eventual drawing power that capability will yield. The capability proven by the demo is useful in itself for doing things like not just "sending" the logo to the various planes of my billboard example, but also easily rotating it as needed on those planes. But its ramifications are much larger.

So don't get me wrong, that capability is very useful. But the real power represented by the rotating star is in how it will play into empowering an illustrator to "draw directly into" a parallel perspective view of objects which are not so conveniently "boxy" in shape and neatly aligned parallel to each other.

Providing the typical basic rectangular warp tool is fine for simple things like distorting something drawn "in the flat" to fit a photo of a monitor or the side of a cereal box. But that's really minor compared to the scope of more fully supporting an entire long-established drawing discipline which will empower users to do a whole lot more.

JET
 

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Seeing your example and then reading that objects don't need to be in boxy regions, perhaps I interpreted the wrong message in Ben's video.

Your idea was not off-point. Ben's demo does apply to your example of positioning multiple separate images on a billboard that is already drawn in perspective (except that the perspective would be a parallel perspective, not a converging perspective with vanishing points, etc.). The salient point of the demo in that context is that you can not only effectively drag and drop those other images (be they rectangles or stars or whatever) onto the face of the billboard, but having done so, you can also freely rotate them while they are "projected" onto that surface just as easily as you would rotate them when drawn "flat on the page."

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I have to be honest though, I don't quite understand how it works and I don't understand all of the terminology in your post.

Don't let the terminology dissuade you. One big misconception is that "isometric" drawing is just a trivial and limited way to draw "boxy" things. At the opposite extreme is another misconception that it is only appropriate to the engineering department for exploded parts catalogs, and that it is more difficult than it actually is.

The terms themselves explain a lot of it:

Isometric (same measure) drawing is just the most commonly used variant of axonometric (axis-measured) drawing. Its defining characteristic is that all three axes of the measuring system are equally foreshortened, so the same scale (same measure) can be used along all three directions.

Dimetric (two measures) orients the coordinate system in such a way that two of the axes are equally foreshortened. So two measuring scales are used (one ruler for the two equally-foreshortened axes, and another for the third one.)

Trimetric (three measures) orients the coordinate system in such a way that all three axes are foreshortened different amounts.

The key is that in all three cases, the three axes are not arbitrarily foreshortened; they are foreshortened in geometrically-correct proportion to each other. The grids feature takes care of that for you.

The system is actually just as venerable and rich a drawing discipline as "vanishing point" perspective, and just as widely applicable to commercial illustration projects (see my Jan 27 post). It's not trivial, but it's not difficult, either. And you don't have to have a mechanical drafting background to use it.

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This method is very new to me, but the example you gave is a good indication of what can be done. I'm sure there will be tutorials and help articles, but I'm having a hard time grasping this.

A few examples already in the Affinity Designer marketing, videos, and Workbook make the point: They range from the mildly "technical" (the building floorplan video) to the completely whimsical (the colorful bird's-eye view fantasy artwork). The stuff Ben has given us a sneak peek at just adds some very useful and powerful automation to the process, which will make such things all the easier and quicker to accomplish.

JET

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No, I understand that this is a 2D program and that there cannot be rotation on multiple planes.

But lest anyone under-appreciate the significance of this feature, here's a simple example of what I'm talking about in the context of your billboard question:

So you see, such a feature set does indeed facilitate "rotation on multiple planes".

Although this is an entirely 2D construction method, and although there is no "live" rotation connection between the default isometric and the custom dimetric grid presets, it's still quite practical in terms of expedience and its result is just as geometrically correct as if it had been generated by a 3D CAE program. This is what I meant in saying that isometric and dimetric (and trimetric) methods can actually be used together in the same drawing. They are not separate, unrelated arbitrary conventions. The grids feature will help you do that.

And much more. The above is fairly trivial. Axonometric drawing is not just about drawing "boxy" objects, or using "clever tricks" to "project" flat designs onto a plane, like the ubiquitous mockup of a cereal box which is all many illustrators with little exposure to isometric drawing mistakenly think it's about. The axonometric grids will be just as useful for constructing mechanically-correct parallel perspective drawings of objects of any shape, and the opportunity it represents to commercial illustrators is significant.

JET

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On ‎1‎/‎28‎/‎2018 at 9:54 AM, Bri-Toon said:

Taking another look at Ben's second sneak peek video on rotating in a plane, I wonder if this would work for something like having a picture on a billboard. I say that because a billboard would consist of multiple elements. So my guess for that approach would be to make different angled square shapes inside the billboard square shape, and then place other shapes inside the smaller squares for rotating. Then just hide the stroke of the smaller squares.

 

I admit, I don't usually use a grid, but I should get in the habit of that assuming that is how objects will snap in. Usually, I would just wing it.

I'm not quite following your description. Maybe post a sketch.

But it sounds like you may be thinking that the preview demo of rotating a star shape amounts to rotating a whole extruded three-dimensional shape (like one of the triangular tubes in a billboard, which rotate to display three different advertisements every few seconds).

If that's what you're talking about, no. The demonstration is of a star shaped path being rotated on one of the three axo planes (the horizontal one). If that star shaped path is going to be used as the horizontal face of star shaped extrusion, rotating the star on the horizontal plane is not going to automatically also rotate the drawings of its vertically extruded sides. (That is, rotating the star is not going to "rotate" the three perpendicular grids together, as if they are a 3D object.)

The feature as demonstrated would, however, help you to correctly construct various views of such a mechanism rotated to as many different positions about the vertical axis as you want.

It's a 2D drawing program, and axonometric drawing is a 2D method for constructing correctly-proportioned 3D parallel perspective (orthographic) views. The three grids are just three 2D grids that span the whole view. They are not an actual 3D cube object that is being rotated when a shape drawn on one of the planes they represent is rotated (although an intuitive interface for their setup could be designed to work that way). But the three grids can be set up to be in proper proportion to each other so as to serve as a 3D coordinate system (and will no doubt be able to automate that proportional linking, as the grids dialog already does).

I assume we will be able to store as many user-defined presets as we want (as one can do in DrawPlus, Technical Designer, etc.) One of the common misconceptions about axonometric drawing is that isometric, dimetric, and trimetric orientations are just arbitrarily derived sets of angles and scales, and have nothing to do with each other. Much of that misconception stems from the limitations of the pre-computer analog tools. A full range of isometric-specific templates, protractors, etc., was (and still is) readily available, while templates for dimetric and trimetric were very few and far between. (Necessarily so, because there are theoretically infinitely many dimetric and trimetric orientations, so manufacturing physical templates for all of them would be unfeasible.) So dependence upon physical drawing tools implied that isometric, dimetric, and trimetric are arbitrary, unrelated systems.

But they are not. Fact is, correctly done isometric, dimetric, and trimetric coordinate systems (axis triads) can actually be used together within the same drawing, when it's expedient to do so. And in software, there's nothing preventing doing so. And it's not nearly as complicated as it may sound to the as-yet uninitiated.

So back to my interpretation of your billboard mechanism question, you could, for example, set up a trio of grid presets to facilitate drawing on (or parallel to) each of the three sides of an extruded triangle. (Think of the billboard structures which support three different whole billboards arranged in a triangle, each one facing a different road at an interchange.)

JET

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e...maybe you don't know Photoshop or other Photo editing software as much as AP?

I can't speak for Psenda, but I certainly do "know Photoshop and other Photo editing software." Frankly, it sounds more to me like Photoshop is the only program with which you are very familiar.

One of the most annoying things that too many software vendors do is mix what should be the clear and normal meanings of saving a file versus exporting a file. And Adobe is one of the worst offenders in this regard. It leads to endless confusion among beginners about a very fundamental concept.

The "Save" word should only be associated with the program's native file format. Whenever a program converts one of its native files to some other file format--be it an exchange format or the proprietary format of another application--that is by definition exporting it.

Similarly, "Open" should only be associated with the program's native file format. Whenever a program converts a foreign file format--be it an exchange format or the proprietary format of another application--to its own native format, that is by definition importing it.

Importing and exporting requires translating parts of the file or its syntax to conform to the standards of the incoming or outgoing format--in other words, altering the file. Failure to understand this is why so many users of any given graphics program continually beat up on their pet program's vendors. Blurring the terminology just creates confusion and frustration among the users.

Illustrator users complain to Adobe because the marketing bullet point claims it can "open" .cdr files. They try to do so and become upset when their Conical Grads and Dimension objects disappear. So they scream "Illustrator is crap! I'm switching to Draw!."

Inversely, Draw users complain to Corel because the marketing bullet point claims it can "open" .ai files. They try to do so and their Brush objects become dumbed-down to groups of simple path objects with no live behaviors. So they scream "Corel Draw is crap! I'm switching to Illustrator!"

Those are just particulars among many, many more examples that are affected in conversions in either direction.

But all that blustery know-it-all nonsense stems from failure to understand that .ai and .cdr are proprietary formats each of which include proprietary constructs that the other doesn't understand (or have rights to). Like Illustrator, Draw has a "Brushes" feature. But that doesn't mean it is anything like an Illustrator Pattern Brush. Like Draw, Illustrator has Grad Fills. But Illustrator only provides the two most basic types: Linear and Radial. And to this day, Illustrator still fails to provide even basic dimension objects.

Inkscape catches a lot of grief from users of other drawing programs who don't understand that it is primarily all about compliance with an open standard  (SVG), even though Inkscape tries to provide clear documentation and alerts to make the user who pays attention aware when an operation or feature is not yet part of the standard.

So my "vote" is: Leave Serif alone in this matter. I strongly applaud its trying to adhere to the meaningful difference between Save and Export, and between Open and Import. I, for one, want to know when I'm actually invoking a conversion filter, and not just "opening" or "saving" a file as-is.

JET

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Sounds neat, but also sounds very niche. Why don’t you just do this kind of stuff in CAD?

Dimension tools are certainly not just for drafting.

If you're referring to isometric drawing in general, well...you're right on cue, I'll give you that. There are many misconceptions about isometric drawing, but that's probably the largest.

Consider: How is explicit support for 2D parallel perspective any less appropriate for a general purpose 2D drawing program than is support for 2D converging perspective? Doesn't the existence of 3D modeling render vanishing point perspective obsolete? I mean, by comparison it's not very realistic. (And as most commonly used, not very rigorous, either.)  Should Adobe not have given Illustrator its Perspective Grid feature (a copy of the almost identical feature which FreeHand introduced years before Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia)?

It's one of those chicken-and-egg things: Do most mainstream drawing programs ignore isometric drawing because there is no demand, or is demand limited to those with experience because there is no express support for it in mainstream drawing programs?

First, in most any city in proximity to a military facility, there are typically a number of private firms, small and large, to which government awards contract work on technical publications. It's a decent size industry in itself. Guess what they do? In many cases, they use mainstream drawing programs to clean up or update 2D drawings exported from CAE systems, or create such drawings from scratch, using working drawings as source material reference. Fact is, the vector line art exports from even high-end CAE software is seldom very pristine.

Industry often does the same thing in-house. That's why programs like Corel Technical Designer and IsoDraw exist. They are basically 2D vector drawing programs, but have accessory extensions (involving costly license fees) which can just open a 3D model and rotate it into the desired viewpoint before exporting it as something ready to be worked on in the 2D drawing environment.

But moreover, contrary to popular misconception, use of isometric drawing (just one variant of axonometric) is not limited to mechanical engineering environs. And commercial illustrators who don't care to add it to their repertoire are missing out on opportunity (and enjoyment).

The dramatically exaggerated converging perspective view of the proposed trade show booth will help sell Management on the design concept. But a few isometric drawings will far better serve the trade show crew to get it built, assembled, and in place on time.

The photo realistic renderings on the box cover of Lego, Lincoln Logs, and Tinker Toy kits will help sell them initially. But the equally colorful isometric step-by-step instructions inside are what ensures success and adds value to the product.

TV ads of the latest, greatest roller coaster will convince the family that they have to go this weekend. But the cartoony yet proportionally-accurate bird's-eye-view theme park map will help them find the coaster amid all the other attractions.

How many of a freelance illustrator's clients for identity graphics or placement ads and brochures are small-to-medium product manufacturers? (A good many in my experience, and they have been delighted to find out I can also produce their products' assembly instructions and exploded parts breakdowns.) Fully rendered axonometric phantom cutaways can intuitively show a product's functional advantages, and show equal detail throughout the depth.

And the list goes on. I sense a long overdue awakening of interest in isometric drawing (and a mass of confusion) within the commercial illustration community, despite the historic neglect of the big-name software vendors. This is going to be an important advantage of Affinity Designer.

JET

 

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...do you think you can consider adding a callout-like tool?

Regarding callouts:

One of the things I applaud about Affinity is the energy toward keeping the program as elegant as possible. A large part of that is avoiding tool glut (separate dedicated tools for every little specific use), and carefully designing features to serve as many uses as possible.

Especially in a general-purpose illustration program, the proper place to provide for things like callouts (and leader-lines, thrust lines, hidden lines, ghosts, etc.) is a carefully built and thorough Graphic Styles feature.

Affinity still lacks a "path ends" feature. I take that as a hopeful indication that the Team has ideas in mind beyond the mediocre standard-fare arrowheads feature. A well thought out path ends feature can address that and much more.

Also, drawing standards vary widely. Some clients (military branches, for example), specify arrowheads on callouts; others don't. Whenever I have the choice, I do not use arrowheads on callouts because in my experience (both in engineering and technical communications, and behind a parts counter) I find them to create unnecessarily distracting visual "blobs" which actually make it more difficult to find the item looked for.

A well-built graphics styles feature set (which allows multiple strokes and fills, stored Symbols for path ends, positioning of path ends relative to the endpoint of the path, and separate settings for each end) allows an illustrator to build as many style libraries as needed for vertical-application uses.

Canvas, for example, includes style libraries for various established drafting standards. That's fine for its specifically technical marketing focus. But much as I like it, Canvas does suffer from a bit of tool glut.

In a general purpose illustration program, an auto-expanding text object grouped with a styled two segment path can serve as a suitable callout object. Individual users can create special purpose Style libraries for their own purposes or to share.

Connector capability, on the other hand, could be very useful not just for technical drawing and not just for the common decision tree graph or org chart, but for many other things. But even here, I'm not convinced its interface has to follow conventional wisdom as a separate "tool" or a separate kind of object. Why can't connections just be an attribute setting for the end node of any open path? 

JET

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Just for clarity to anyone who may not be acquainted with axonometric drawing: I'm not talking at all about 3D modeling. If I want to model things in 3D, I use a 3D modeling program.

But axonometric is a 2D drawing construction method. That's why it's entirely appropriate for any modern, mainstream, general-purpose, 2D commercial illustration program.

The foundational principle of axonometric drawing is that direct measures are made along the three drawing axes (using correctly-proportioned scales). Measures for object edges which are not parallel to the axes (what I'll call off-axis measures) are transferred from measures made along the axes. (At least that was the case in the days of drawing "on the board.")

The screenshots below are from DrawPlus 8. Page rulers are set to inches.

On the left, the hexagon is drawn in the flat. The simple, straightforward dimension tool in DrawPlus was used to add the dimensions. The distance across the flats of the hexagon is 3 inchs.

On the right, a copy of the hexagon was sent to what DrawPlus calls the "Top Plane" grid. Now, by default, when you set DrawPllus's grids to isometric, the grid increments are foreshortened (as they should be). That is, a "one inch" measure along the grid lines is actually .8165 inch.

But note that when the same Dimension Tool is used to create a dimension on the Top Plane, it still shows a measure of 3 inches. In other words, the Dimension Tool is automatically taking into consideration the foreshortened scale of the axonometric plane. That is exactly the way you would want a dimension tool to work in Affinity.

Moreover, note that even the off-axis measure of one of the flats is also labeled correctly even though it, too, is foreshortened and is not parallel to any of the isometric axes. The Dimension Tool correctly labels the flat 1.73 inches in both drawings. Again, this is what you want.

Now, just that much functionality is far beyond what any of Affinity Designer's direct competitors offer. Even ACD Canvas (historically Deneba Canvas)--a venerable program which I love, and which is nowadays explicitly marketed toward technical illustration--provides nothing like that. The axonometric grids feature of Serif DrawPlus is very much like that of far more expensive Corel Technical Designer.

This is basic functionality for axonometric drawing; support for which should have been commonplace in mainstream drawing programs decades ago. But it wasn't. So DrawPlus was ahead of its time in this regard.

So the next step: Those dimension objects in DrawPlus are not "live linked" to the paths they were snapped to while drawing them, as they are in some programs which provide dimension tools. That is, if I drag the width handle of the hexagon's bounding box, the 3 inch dimension object does not automatically follow and update its value. That kind of linking between the dimension object and the path does exist, however, if the dimension object was snapped to bounding box handles when it was created.

But even when the dimension object was not snapped to bounding box handles, its value is at least "live" in connection to its own bounds. So, for example, I can grab the right end handle of the 3 in dimension object and snap it to the end of one of the flats (second screenshot), and its updated value still respects the angular foreshortening of the grid. (Note its value is the same as the other one originally created to measure one of the flats.) This, to me, is practically just as well. If I change the shape of a path that is already "on" one of the axonometric planes, it is not onerous to then drag the handles of a dimension object that is already on that plane. So long as the dimension objects which are created on one of the axo planes properly reflect the foreshortening of that plane, we're good.

I'm not saying DrawPlus is perfect. When creating dimension objects, the Dimension Tool seems to respect snapping to bounding box handles, but not actual snapping to nodes. I would certainly expect Affinity's implementation to fully respect node snapping (and any other snapping candidates the user has turned on).

Another important element (just so I can rest assured it isn't overlooked): Even moderately serious axonometric drawing inevitably involves not just "simple rotation" (rotation of an object edge measure on one of the axo planes; in other words, rotation about one axis), but also "compound rotation" (rotation about two axes). Both simple and compound rotation are where elliptical protractors come in.

Thankfully, Affinity already provides elliptical protractors:

• Live ellipse objects also serve as arcs. Start and End angles are provided.
• Disproportionally scaling a live ellipse object correctly scales its angles only in the direction of the minor diameter. That is, if you...:

1. Draw a 1 in circle.
2. Clone the circle and drag it straight downward.
3. Scale the copy vertically 57.74% (to make it an isometric ellipse).
4. Set the Start and End angles of the top circle.
5. Set the Start and End angles of the ellipse to the same values.

...then you will see that the Start and End angles of both the circle and the ellipse are aligned horizontally. That is, a vertical line drawn downward from the circle's End angle will intersect the End angle of the ellipse. (The circle effectively represents a "top view" of the ellipse.) This is exactly the way you want ellipse angles to work. (There are drawing programs which don't work this way, and it renders the angular functionality useless for illustration, as opposed to trivial flat-on-the-page design work.)

So Affinity's live ellipse objects already serve just fine as elliptical protractors for axonometric drawing, and can correctly construct both simple and compound rotations. That functionality must not be broken when a live ellipse is "sent to" one of the axonometric planes. This specific thing was broken in DrawPlus at one time, but I believe it was fixed after it was brought to Serif's attention.

JET

[Ideas for Designer 1.7]

Random feature request "collection" threads like this are useless. Individual feature requests should be posted in individual threads, so the discussion of a given request is contiguous and can be followed.

JET