gdenby

Dang, I always forget about blend ranges. Don't know why. Just tried that on some line art, and found that adding another node at 5h 50% position sitting at 100% cleaned up the line art.

AD does not yet have a mesh warp tool. Its on the road map, but no ETA. Photo does have a bit map mesh warp that can be used on rasterized text.

I used Photo. I've messed around making vector half tones in Designer, but so far its meant a lot of work, and nothing as nice as what Photo does. If you do need the sharp lines, I'd suggest all vector lines. Shading would be quite hard, but the style would fit well w. the client's logo.

Better than mine.

I have the Huion 1409 V1. For my iPad, I was able to get a plastic screen film that has a little drag, like paper. As far as I know, there is nothing like this available for the Huion, tho' if I could find a source for the plastic in generic sizes, I could make one. I'd do that because the main downside of the Huion (unlike one of my old Wacoms) is that the stylus skates across the slippery surface. Just this after noon, had to do lots of undos when the tip skidded.

From what I can tell from the vid, what you are doing should work. I tried using some Frankentoon brushes, they worked fine. I could nest the pixel layers into the vector, and they clipped fine. You say it only happens w. some files. I don't recall anyone posting a similar problem, but I have to wonder if there is not some sort of file corruption. Perhaps try a file "save as" and over write the old one and then try the pixel additions?

Hi, iMac1943 (Luc), The .png is what I call "hideously noisy and pixelated bit map art that is hell to turn to vector." If you did lots of processing, such as resampling up to maybe smooth the pixelization, running noise filters, messing w. levels or contrast, then posterizing, or applying a threshold filter, then running it thru an auto trace, the vectors would most likely still need a ton of work. And not give you a grey scale effect. So I ran the .png thru a de-noise filter, and a little gaussian blur, and the some contrast adjustment. Then used a halftone filter, once as dots, the other as lines. Combined them to see how it looked. The result is a bitmap, so it may not scale well. What did:

Hi, wkarch, While the Affinity Suite comes w. some assets for UI design, it does not ship w. images for architecture, or anything else. Don't know where you might find the resources you mention, tho' I've stumbled across a few. Shutterstock appears to have a wide range of image for a fee. Placing images is fairly easy, tho adjusting the images to work w. the 3D renderings might be tricky.

Hi, mrqasq, Affinity Designer has "symbols." I've only used then a little bit, but I think they can do exactly what you want. Here's my possibly clumsy explanation. I made a rounded rectangle, changed the fill color and added a stroke. Using the the symbol studio, I made the selection a symbol, and duplicated it 7 times. One of the symbols, I detached, and change the rectangle to no stroke and a gradient fill. I then turned that into a new symbol. Duplicated that. I took one of the originals, and turned synching off. I changed the fill color, and then re-synched. Its color is now unlinked, but other properties will change along w. the originals.

Hi, Susanne99, Line thickness control using just a mouse and velocity as a controller is really hard, for me at least. Going into the pressure settings is slow, but more accurate. Consider saving a bunch of stroke pressure settings as layer styles. That way you can rough out your drawing, and apply whatever inflection you like, and tweak the individual vectors if need be.

I had a couple of Wacoms over the years, and they were fine, tho' pricey. I got a Huion after I started w. Affinity. The specs are as good as my older Wacoms, and the size for the price is much better. I've been satisfied. You get used to watching the screen while moving a tablet stylus. Not nearly as hard as basic drawing instruction where I had to repeatedly try drawing without ever looking at my work surface. Tablet computers tend to be expensive. I tried one some years ago, and found it hard to use for art purposes. Too unwieldy, rather slow. I currently have the large iPad Pro. Tho' the touch response w the iPencil is outstanding, the drawing area is rather small, and the tablet itself is rather heavy. As a comparison w. traditional media, a piece of paper taped to a thin piece of plywood, or a stiff illu board is much lighter. I guess I need an iEasel.

Hi, Boldinedesign, The vector brush is a vector only in that there is a vector core that has a bitmap stretched or repeated over it. It is sort of in between vector and bitmap. Depending somewhat on what the specialized brushes were like, you might be able to export the work as a .png, and put that thru an auto-tracer to turn it to .svg, etc.

The vector brush uses any selected brush automatically. The pencil does not. It can draw a very expressive stroke, far more natural than the pen. But adding the bitmap "brush" image has to be done afterwards. The documentation is not clear. You aren't doing anything wrong. I just noted that after drawing a pencil line, w. pressure selected as the controller, and then added to the brush stroke, I could continue drawing from that particular scribble with the same texture. So the "brush" texture sticks to the stroke, not to the tool.

I don't have any Adobe apps at present. But Designer outputs .psd, .pdf, and .eps. Down load the 10 day trial, and see what you can transfer to and fro'.

Hi, Nashi, I think the documentation should probably read some thing like: ""Line Styles (e.g., dashed or brush textures) can be applied using the Stroke Studio. For brush textures, select the brush option in the stroke studio and then pick a brush from the Brushes Studio."

Hi, exurbanite7, As one who sometimes wonders how many brain cells are still firing, much less still plastic, I have lots of "D'oh!" moments. I don't have a good camera, just the one in my iPad. Open photo in AP, select crop tool, crop and/or rotate, and export so as to not overwrite the original.

Export as .pdf, the Adobe open source file format. The clients can open in AI, and save as .ai.

If you have drawn a vector by tapping points on the screen, the node will be sharp. Control handles in that case are set to 0. If you select any or all of the nodes w. the node tool, and change them to smooth nodes, handles should appear. If you want to keep the nodes sharp, with the node tool, push the line, and you will see handles appear between the adjacent sharp nodes.

And suddenly, a face! To step back a day or 2, it occurred to me that a lot of what you were/are doing is sort of like what I might expect from an interstellar drone transmission. Schematic. Minimal. Ever see Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey"? That was the 1st time I ever saw CG. Check out the starting image here. I couldn't even begin to imagine how the vector graphics on the control display were being done. But when 2001 CG in reality arrived, everything was so much more detailed. Useful, I suppose, but not more evocative.

Good! I'm coming up to speed on the iPad version. But, I've spent some time on the desktop working on lens flare effect. No notable success so far. Care to make a post on the tutorial section?

Hi, Det_Michy, Moderator MEB has this list of resources at his site. Look those up, its good stuff.

Hi, philipt18, I mostly use Designer, but I think Photo will do 3 of the 4 samples I'll show. Affinity has a feature called power duplicate. One can draw a shape, move/rotate/scale, and repeat identically using the "duplicate" command via the keyboard short cut. Many many items can be created, and grouped. In the example, the diagonals were done this way. The ellipses were all done just by copy and paste. In the upper left, I power duplicated squares in rows and columns, and nested the resulting checkerboard inside the ellipse. Lower left, it is vertical pen strokes, set to dashed lines. Upper right, I used one of my homemade vector brushes at a width that filled the ellipse w. 4 strokes. Photo does not have a vector brush. Bottom right, I found an old Ben Day stipple pattern in my collection, couldn't find any checkerboards, made it neutral grey, and placed it as a bitmap fill in the ellipse, adding a recolor adjustment to match the main color. I would suppose something like these would help.

I don't dictate anything, so I'm clueless about how working like that is. I have no experience w. SBP. Seems to be a pretty good app from what I was able to see w. some quick searches. All pixel based, it seems, so not quite like Designer, which is really aimed at vector work. If you have AD on a Mac, you will see that much of what you want, if not all, is available in the Pixel persona. A tablet and pen is preferable, but a mouse does the job OK. You can cut and paste a section of a pixel layer, and use the transform widgets to flip it, and then move it to where you will. Not fully automatic mirroring, but fairly quick. Same w. scaling and rotation, tho' that happens within the bounding box defined by the lasso. On the desktop, all the tools have short cuts, so less need to click on those, tho the widgets for the tools still need clicking. Straight lines, click, hold down shift, and click to next point. The iPad version w. pencil is more responsive, tho' the interface is more cramped. Straight lines are made by click, hold down finger, and click else where. Attached, quickie from iPad using different brush settings for text. Vector text can be made as quickly, but there is no eraser for that at present. Only manual delete. If you have a keyboard for the iPad, some of the keyboard short cuts are available, but not all. Hope this helps some.

Fine work. I haven't approached what I can do on the desktop on the iPad, so I'm doubly impressed. I was thinking it would be dancing sausage animals, rather like balloons, but w. grill marks. Maybe w. some happy leaping mustard and ketchup bottles.

Yes, that's a standard work around. I used Illustrator off and on for maybe 25 years. I hadn't read any reviews of AD, but found myself in a position where the Adobe subscription model was not even possible. No reliable net connection, and painfully slow when up. And I really disliked having to "tithe" instead of buying out right, which I would have done if I didn't need a network connection to use a current version. I knew right away that portions of AD were up to where AI was when it was maybe 5 years old, others, 10 years or so. But the interface was good, the performance better. As my younger daughter mentioned, Designer had more blend modes than Photoshop, and was quite impressed w. some of the near real time gradient and transparency alterations. I later came across stuff that talked about "killer" attributes. A clone, if you will. No, but a very viable alternative for many operations. Unfortunately, this leads to lots of comments from users who say "I did it this way in AI," or "In Corel, you just do this." Take a look at the roadmap.