gdenby

Hi, g_bottini, At this point, the Affinity suite does not have a select by attribute feature. As far as I can tell, while the apps have the attribute definitions for various objects, there is no database for characteristics or "find and replace" that will work thru the objects. If you want various curves to change color all together, define a global color, and apply that to the curves. When the color is changed, all the curves will change.

Hello, again, willscott, Just showed the thread to my daughter and SIL. They were pretty supportive, but I didn't try to pick their brains too much. The agreement from them was to : 1. Get a larger sample image. Highest resolution possible. The original sample in the thread displeased them. 2. Hand trace the contour images as best one can. That is the base. 3. Reduce the image to whatever size it needs to be for the area to be tattooed, and print onto transfer paper. 4. Do the line work, and add shading in whatever method in which the artist is most comfortable, referring to the original image as one works. For them, not useful to have printed shading. They would do fine lines in different grey shades as required. They agreed that placing a shell and/or leaves around the walnut kernel would be a good idea, as illustrated in some of the above samples. Likewise, some color rather than B&W would probably be more effective. To get this a bit more AD oriented, I'll offer that using the vector pencil, preferably w. a tablet, would be a good way to do the contours. The line weight can be modified to show how the edge curves fade away when moving between different depths.

Nice way you got the blur effect from working w. 2 images from a stream. I would have liked to look over your shoulder as you worked out the method you describe.

Hi, Dazmondo77, Really good work. Good to see the outline view showing the strokes. Seems like you have good hand and eye motion even w. software. Your own brushes, or some else's you are using?

Hi, willscott, I've been trying to make a response for about 8 - 9 hours, but I'm stymied for several reasons. 1. I know little about tattoo art. I know for B&W, there are different methods for line art, and blends of line and stipple. But I don't know specifically how the tattoo pens work to produce those. Yes, many many punctures, but is it better to do fine line weight gradations for shading, or can loose dotting work for grey scale? Which gets to 2. I'm supposing that when you ask about gradients, the work can be done w. stippling. And/or using dilute ink to make a grey-ish color. I work mainly w. Designer, and one can assign multiple gradients to a single vector outline by grouping the object to itself. That can be tricky. It is better to nest multiple objects w. different gradients and levels of transparency within a parent object. Photo has a nice color filter that creates monochrome dots. A simple B&W conversion, but I don't know how useful this would be for making tattoos, since doing a manual transcription would probably be way too tedious. And in the end, after messing about w. the sample image, it seems that recognition fails after just a small amount of manipulation. If the image is desaturated, most of the "walnut" perception goes away. Its a grey blob. Just a small decrease in detail turns it into a Rohschach blot. Personally, I'd go w. lots of contour lines. Sorry to not be of much, if any, help. My elder daughter and her husband will be visiting in a day and a half. They have 30+ years doing tattoos between them, and they may have some pointers, tho' they do not use Affinity, and I know little about their practices. Perhaps they will offer suggestions.

Hi, MacMahem, The file has 2 "curve" vectors, and 1 "curves" vector. Simple curves can be joined, but "curves" can not. Those have to be divided into the component curves for the node join command to join the pieces. The node join curves tool will select the 2 closest nodes, and connect there. Not between selected nodes.

Hi, jef2vec, The limiting factor does seem to be that the gap can only bee 100 X of the width. It appears that the line width, .001mm for the dash size, is supported, but the gap, as far as I can tell would need to be around 1400. FWIW, I need to be zoomed in 1500000 times to see the dots. So also really hard to see what is going on. Just curious, what kind of laser cutter is used for this? The specs for ones I've seen have a kerf of around .2 mm. So is the dash point just the center of a .2 mm burn?

Hi, onieder, Converting a selection to a "path" as Adobe calls them, essentially doing a bitmap trace to create a vector, is something that comes up very often. Many Affinity users, myself included, find that either free or very low cost vectorizing utilities can do the job. It does add maybe a minute onto a task. Usually, for me, less, so its something I can manage

Hi, kconkling, I can offer some answers, take them w. a grain of salt, I'm just a user. When a style is saved, it remains within the application. It can be exported as an .afstyles files using the "hamburger" menu in the styles studio panel. Exporting them is good if one needs to reset the app to factory defaults, and bring back ones styles. The design files are for any document, or object in a document. Photoshop has some layer style operations that are not implemented in Designer at this point. Look at Designer's layer FX options. if there are operations similar to those in Photoshop, the style might be translated. Also, note that Designer can only replicate features that are public, not proprietary to Photoshop. Some things created in Photoshop can only be used w. Photoshop. The various studio panels can be pulled away, and float in the work space. AFAIK, layer styles and text styles are not the same because text styles are aimed at standard modifications of text, such as bolding, or kerning. If the text is converted to curves, and becomes a plain geometric object, then layer styles are applicable. In Designer, transparency is indicated by a grey checkerboard, not a color. I don't use pixel mask much, but the level of transparency in them is adjusted by painting in black or white. Objects/layers/groups in Designer are surrounded by an implied bounding box. The object itself is the perimeter defined by the nodes, but all of those are referenced by the x/y rectangle that they fit in. Blank style icons may be because the style was applied to a perfectly straight horizontal or vertical line. From what i can tell, because such a line encloses no area, there is no way to depict any fill attribute for the style.

Hi, all, A sample from something i've been working on for the last month. A drawing made from a rather poor cell phone camera shot. Knowing the guy, I liked the expression from the photo as he sat outside on a cool day in the sunlight. The colors are based on those that might have been used up to 500 years ago. Ochre, green earth, indigo, azurite mixed w. chalk. Sort of an illustration for a short story.

Hi, spaggi, I did try and make the selection smoother, but wasn't very happy w. the results. So I made a vector object, and placed the bitmap in that to give a smooth edge. Then remade the backgroun and shadow.

Hi, patriciamelvill, I haven't the faintest idea how it might have happened, but it appears that the brush "dab" spacing and/or x - y spacing was altered. Select the brush, use the right mouse button "Edit Brush" menu, and reset the brush.

Also check out: http://xahlee.info/SpecialPlaneCurves_dir/specialPlaneCurves.html http://www.demonstrations.wolfram.com/LogarithmicSpiral/ etc. from the same site. Note: Mathematica for home/hobby use is still a fair piece of change. And it appears that getting a pure vector .svg out of it is a bit of a trick. Seems like a dedicated spiral app might be a better source. I see that there is only 1 type available in Inkscape. I have to suppose that unless there is a large demand for volutes, perhaps for architects designing neo-neo-classical buildings, there isn't much need for a dedicated tool. Perhaps a formula a bit more advanced than what firstdefence uses in a power duplicate might be good for those who want to generate various spirals once in awhile. Not just geometric scaling, but log scaling.

I don't use Inkscape much. On the Mac, running under XQuartz, the interface and performance is really poor. But I do very frequently move .svg files back and forth between Inkscape and Designer. I only had one problem. Inkscape's arrowhead feature doesn't render in Designer 1.6. Otherwise, no problems. Have you tried opening up the "g6726" layer? It may be that because of the way Designer displays "child" layers in vector view, you are only seeing what is within the top most Inkscape object. Alternatively, switch to outline view. I think you will probably see the wire frame of the Inkscape vectors.

Hi, PanSpec, While I used Adobe apps sporadically for many years, it was only a small part of my job. From what I can infer, while both Adobe and Serif software use some terms in common, the words specify somewhat different things. This leads to a fair number of problems for people taking up Affinity apps after Photoshop or Illustrator. Specifically, it appears that paths in the Adobe software, and lines, or curves in Affinity are made differently. While I haven't used Photoshop in at least 7 years, I've spent some time watching vids posted here w. people asking "How do I do this in Affinity?" What I infer is that Photoshop and Illustrator can work with paths that can be assembled to make networks, w. each cell in the network having different attributes if so desired. The curve(s) objects in Affinity imply an area. Nominally, each is a layer, because there can be a layer hierarchy where the implied areas are merged. Or, the "child " areas are nested within the parent(s"), and can inherit some of the attributes of the parents, such as adjustments. The Affinity layers/curves can be grouped within a layer by selecting a layed, and then clicking the "in sert inside" widget to place the next drawn figure in that layer. Note, while Affinity Photo has many of the vector drawing capabilities of Designer, you might find it easier to create your vector object in that app. Then transfer those to Photo for its more extensive color manipulation and pixel filter operations.

Good move.

Hi, Cloonix, I came at it in a slightly different way. I took a base shape, duplicated it a couple of times, and applied color gradients and transparency fades. It is a bit fussier than one might like to do. DSweep.afdesign

Polygonius, I'm having trouble understanding what you write. I'm sure its just a problem with word translation. For instance, "I want THE HALF of a rectangle ( circle just as outline, but "open" visible." how does a half rectangle and a circle go together? Are you trying to work w. parts of parametric shapes that do not have fills? If so, just manipulate the vector nodes. Can you make a quick drawing of what you want, and post it?

Hi, Erica, It is possible in Designer. It was possible in v 1.6, maybe earlier, but fairly difficult. Features in the beta 1.7 make it easier. As follows, in the mannequin, the arm nodes are rotated together, and repositioned. The "shoulder" is deformed, and I had to mess w. 4 nodes to remedy that. Took a minute or so once I had put together the figure. For more extensive work, I think it probably would be better to build shapes made out of elements linked in a skeleton "hierarchy." But at this point, Designer does Bezier curves, and not NURBS, so it would be clumsy.

A couple of weeks ago, when this topic came up yet again, I spent some time using Inkscape to make arrows, and other stroke markers. When I exported .svg files of various kinds, Designer was not rendering the the markers. Chrome and Safari rendered them in different ways. My supposition at the time was that there were various ways to align the markers reference box perpendicular to the line slope. So, maybe it was not an exactly trivial problem. I would suppose at this point, any number of markers could be used. Nice eye diagram, btw.

I'm assuming what is needed is to create a "poster" from tiles of smaller sheets of paper. My only experience with anything like that was to rely on the printer driver or sometimes a stand alone utility to scale up or down the primary document. There seems to be something else going on from what I can guess from the sample .pdfs. The design has been spread across 3 A0 sheets. I would suppose that this is a size that would be useful in production. Given that A4 is 1/32 the area of a single A0, sending the A0 document to a printer should output 96 pages, many of which would be empty. Seeing that the A4 example is 31 sheets, I suppose some rather complicated math was done to fit the design into those sizes. US letter size is a different proportion rectangle, and so would be yet another scale. That is, the long side A sizes are 1.4142 of the width, while US letter is 1.2941. Maybe try this. Make a custom size sheet in affinity big enough accommodate all of the pattern. Assume that sending the file to .pdf output will have the ability to select a sheet size for the tiles, and do an auto-fit. Perhaps for better US letter output, scale the main document pattern objects by .915, being sure the strokes are not set the change with size.

Hi, Euclide, The pen line already is a curve. Turn to curve works on the parametric shapes, or text. To add a node to the pen line, select the pen line, switch to the node tool. You will then be able to add, delete, and modify the position of nodes, as well as their control handles.

That the piece is in skylight lighting makes sense. The "Birth of Venus" and other works are in tempera. AFAIK, tempera uses all inorganic pigments, at least when Botticelli was working. The same stuff used to color frescos. But anything like azurite, which might have been used on the sky, has long since faded. So no longer any harm showing it under day light. I have to wonder, how are you going to make a shorthand of all of the wave whitish foam lines?

I thought the same thing myself. When AI started using the image, the fine arts department responded by having a class where the people using traditional media were given the assignment of doing a replica in paint, ink. watercolor. There was a lot of tension between those doing physical, aka analogue, and those doing digital. Don't know that it ever was resolved except for photos, and then, only when film was no longer available.

Hi, All Media Lab, It would be great to see this in the Affinity suite. I do think there are other things that do and should have a higher priority. In the meantime, maybe install the cwebp command line encoder on your system.