Aammppaa

These are no longer the latest Windows customer beta builds (see last build in this thread):
Affinity Designer Customer Beta build 1.9.0.891 for Windows  (NEW) Affinity Photo Customer Beta build 1.9.0.891 for Windows  (NEW) Affinity Publisher Customer Beta build 1.9.0.887 for Windows   Please follow this thread for forum notifications of new Windows beta builds

Good morning everyone!
I'm new to the forum, my name is Judith Vidal and I'm a concept artist.
I've been using affinity photo for a few months for everything that is concept and illustration and this is one of the results of the experience, I hope you like it.
You can see more work on my instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/jvidaldraw/
Thanks
J Vidal.

 

Click here to download the latest beta
Status: Customer Beta
Purpose: Features, Improvements, Fixes
Requirements: A valid product key (for Affinity Store purchases), or an installation of the full retail version from the Microsoft Store

As this is a beta it is considered to be not suitable for production use. This means that you should not attempt to use it for commercial purposes or for any other activity that may be adversely affected by the application failing, including the total loss of any documents. We hope you enjoy the latest build, and as always, if you've got any problems, please don't hesitate to post a new thread in this forum and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks once again for your continued feedback. 

If you have a general question about the software, please head over to the Questions Forum, or if you have any suggestions, please head over to the Feature Requests forum.
Changes
Fixed Adjustment layers not invalidating the bleed and pasteboard area they affect  Added Export Preview Added resumable downloads  Changed Lock Colourspace (on the Colour Chooser etc) to be on by default Added missing Reapply Base Styles text menu entry Fixed being unable to apply Styles with a single click  Fixed Layer Effects being incorrectly rasterised in PDF export 1.9.0.876 release notes

Added Export Preview Ehm, a microscopic preview? Weird when exporting poster sized documents. Not usable for even small JPG images. How can anyone inspect the preview for JPG artifacts, check gradients and details?

Click here to download the latest beta
Status: Customer Beta
Purpose: New features, performance, fixes
Requirements: A valid product key (for Affinity Store purchases), or an installation of the full retail version from the Microsoft Store

As this is a beta it is considered to be not suitable for production use. This means that you should not attempt to use it for commercial purposes or for any other activity that may be adversely affected by the application failing, including the total loss of any documents. We hope you enjoy the latest build, and as always, if you've got any problems, please don't hesitate to post a new thread in this forum and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks once again for your continued feedback. 

If you have a general question about the software, please head over to the Questions Forum, or if you have any suggestions, please head over to the Feature Requests forum.
Changes
Added Export As Timelapse capability  Added Astrophotography Use the more correct perspective grid drawing for the live perspective tool Fixed Linked filters name Added Export Preview Added resumable downloads  Changed Lock Colourspace (on the Colour Chooser etc) to be on by default Added missing Reapply Base Styles text menu entry Fixed being unable to apply Styles with a single click  Fixed Layer Effects being incorrectly rasterised in PDF export 1.9.0.876 release notes

I fancied doing something shiny, not too easy but not too complicated either, 2 weeks max, so decided to see if I could get this done. Shame it turned out to be such a horrible movie. There was too much background on the photo I used so I cropped it to something a bit more interesting.
Who needs fancy pants gradient meshes when there’s the pen tool
Sorry about the equally horrible compression.

Fingers crossed. It is terribly basic at present.

Fingers crossed. It is terribly basic at present.

Agree. It grieves me to see new features released in a sub-par state. It needs not only multiple contours, but control over spacing rate, either uniform or increasing / decreasing. (Think of surface contour lines on maps.) See CorelDraw's Contour Tool. It's been around so long and so many use it that that's going to be expected as minimum functionality by thousands.
As a minimal workaround, there should at least be a keyboard shortcut one could tap to commit a contour while dragging the tool, so one could continue dragging for the next contour, commit it, and so on.
JET

This appears to be a good beginning to a contour tool, but not really all that useful yet.  I would love to see a setting for multiple contours where we could type in a number and get that many contours around the object.  Also it would be useful to be able to select each contour  set the colour of each contour individually and different from the object.  and  perhaps baking ( which is pretty much just converting to curves unless I'm missing something?) could have some settings to allow either the current behaviour or the creation of multiple objects ie the original object and the contours each rendered as separate vector objects.

From 3 pm GMT on Thursday 24th December 2020 until 9 am GMT Monday 4th January 2021 the Serif company is officially closed. There will be some light coverage of the support channels during these 12 days, but most staff are taking time off whilst the offices are closed. Customer Service and Technical Support tickets will take priority and queries about bugs and beta builds will be picked up in the New Year. Unusually, the way the year has panned out a number of staff have not been on holiday for obvious reasons so some are also taking annual holiday now before this company closure, and so it is fair to say that from this week there will be fewer staff here on the forums. 
Please bear with us if you contact us during this time and potentially for a short time after the annual closure, whist we deal with any backlog.
Thank you in advance for your patience and we will make every effort to address your queries in the shortest time-frame possible.

Status: Beta
Purpose: Updates and Fixes
Requirements: Purchased Affinity Publisher
Windows Store: Not submitted
Download: Download
Auto-update: Available
Hi,
We are pleased to announce that Affinity Publisher Customer Beta 1.9.0.874 is now available as a download from the link above.
If this is your first time using a customer beta of an Affinity app, it’s worth noting that the beta will install as a separate app - alongside your store version. They will not interfere with each other at all and you can continue to use the store version for critical work without worry.
This beta is significant update from the 1.8 version available for purchase - we strongly recommend that you do not use this beta for real work as data could be lost and the files you save are not guaranteed to open in previous or future versions of Affinity Publisher.
---
Fixes And Improvements
General
Fixed issues with Assets Panel
Fixed display of and snap to Column Guides
Snap to Object Geometry snapping to curve intersections was broken
Document profile PDX Export preflight tweak, falls back to CMYK profile for RGB / LAB documents
(Win) Fixes various issues with mishandling of CJK fonts in the UI
Selection Context Menu
(Win) Fixed crash when using Ctrl+Right Click on empty area
(Win) Only dig into containers when the Secondary modifier is not held down
(Win) Parent node added to top of submenu
Rendering
Fix for rotated or skewed filled rectangles not rendering correctly under OpenCL compute
Master Pages
Pinned objects from Master Pages were not showing in bleed 
Resizing a single page master could cause spreads that used it to be resized incorrectly
Guides lost from Master Page when changing from facing to single pages
(Win) Paste as Content into Master Page Picture Frames was disabled
(Win) Fixes for margins setup on a Master Page
Images and Resources
Fix for xlsx import currency parsing
Fixed issue opening heic files with extended characters in the file path
Fixes for specific PDF import failures
PDF Passthrough not automatically set if PDF drag dropped from Finder / Explorer
Fixed warnings about over-size export files
Resource Manager could scale cropped objects on Replace
Resource Manager now shows Artboard names instead of Page Numbers for placed Artboard documents
Resource Manager 'Replace' for Picture Frame content was not working correctly
(Win) Passthrough PDFs could fail to print
(Win) Inconsistency with the 'Include Bleed' option on the Export Dialog
(Win) Resource Manager now highlights group of selected resource if group is collapsed
Text
Text Frame button missing from context toolbar for Text on a Path
More consistent handling of mid-word punctuation
Text wrap settings on images could become distorted after a document save and load
Fixed issue adding tab stops to the Text Ruler
Fixed issue where grouping could change text size due to anomaly in layer setup
RTF export / copy paste was losing hyphens under certain circumstances
(Win) Fixed selection highlighting issue in Text Styles panel
(Win) Current Formatting box in the Text Styles panel was not always updating correctly
TOC
Style changes not always picked up as out of date for TOC
Bookmarks created by TOC not in the correct order when exported to PDF
Data Merge
Fixed Data Merge crash with no source selected
---
Release Notes for 1.9.0.863
Release Notes for 1.9.0.850
Release Notes for 1.9.0.843
Release Notes for 1.9.0.829
Release Notes for 1.9.0.822
Release Notes for 1.9.0.798
Release Notes for 1.9.0.796
Release Notes for 1.9.0.742
---
To be notified about all future Windows beta updates, please follow this notification thread 
To be notified when this Publisher update comes out of beta and is fully released to all Publisher customers, please follow this thread

hey there 🤣
let me show you guys what we've done so far to help the creative affinity users community to create vectors from drawings
in case you are interested about to see my real time process the link is available here below
enjoy!
https://youtu.be/ojrX5wsXmH0
 

There is not - I also don't understand why clicking the node with alt pressed doesn't just toggle the node type.
CorelDRAW has keyboard shortcuts for toggling nodes into the desired (specific) node type and it is exactly what I need. One key-press and I get exactly what I want. It shows understanding of how people work and what they actually need.

Click here to download the latest beta
Status: Customer Beta
Purpose: New features, performance, fixes
Requirements: A valid product key (for Affinity Store purchases), or an installation of the full retail version from the Microsoft Store

As this is a beta it is considered to be not suitable for production use. This means that you should not attempt to use it for commercial purposes or for any other activity that may be adversely affected by the application failing, including the total loss of any documents. We hope you enjoy the latest build, and as always, if you've got any problems, please don't hesitate to post a new thread in this forum and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks once again for your continued feedback. 

If you have a general question about the software, please head over to the Questions Forum, or if you have any suggestions, please head over to the Feature Requests forum.
Changes
Enabled (more) accurate history thumbnails Added support for JpegXR RGB 101010 Fixed crash when entering Develop Persona during macro recording session Fixed rotated or skewed filled rectangles (with no stroke) rendering incorrectly (fills extending to rotated bounding box)  Fixed Hue shift slider background to not move with the slider  Fixed crash when using Ctrl+Right Click (Selection context menu) on empty area  Fixed crash on startup if a proxy is configured without a scheme Fixed inability to add tab stop lower than the already existing highest value  Fixed pasted images incorrectly having the document colour space in Resource Manager instead of the image's colour space  Fixed crash changing Character Decorations Outline Colour without a document open  Fixed crash loading images greater than 2GB in size Fixed failure to load TIFF files greater than 2GB in size Fixed cursor not being visible after interacting with the Export dialog  Allow variations in file extensions during export (e.g. *.tiff and *.tif). Default extension is first in the list (i.e. *.jpeg, *.tiff). Changed the preference 'Import PSD Text As Text' to be enabled by default 1.9.0.864 release notes

Click here to download the latest beta
Status: Customer Beta
Purpose: Features, Improvements, Fixes
Requirements: A valid product key (for Affinity Store purchases), or an installation of the full retail version from the Microsoft Store

As this is a beta it is considered to be not suitable for production use. This means that you should not attempt to use it for commercial purposes or for any other activity that may be adversely affected by the application failing, including the total loss of any documents. We hope you enjoy the latest build, and as always, if you've got any problems, please don't hesitate to post a new thread in this forum and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks once again for your continued feedback. 

If you have a general question about the software, please head over to the Questions Forum, or if you have any suggestions, please head over to the Feature Requests forum.
Changes
Fixed performance problems with OpenCL enabled Fixed rotated or skewed filled rectangles (with no stroke) rendering incorrectly (fills extending to rotated bounding box)  Fixed Hue shift slider background to not move with the slider  Fixed crash when using Ctrl+Right Click (Selection context menu) on empty area  Fixed crash on startup if a proxy is configured without a scheme Fixed inability to add tab stop lower than the already existing highest value  Fixed pasted images incorrectly having the document colour space in Resource Manager instead of the image's colour space  Fixed crash changing Character Decorations Outline Colour without a document open  Fixed crash loading images greater than 2GB in size Fixed failure to load TIFF files greater than 2GB in size Fixed cursor not being visible after interacting with the Export dialog  Allow variations in file extensions during export (e.g. *.tiff and *.tif). Default extension is first in the list (i.e. *.jpeg, *.tiff). Changed the preference 'Import PSD Text As Text' to be enabled by default 1.9.0.864 release notes

...and if you are working at a colour change for the guides, can I suggest you make it possible to remove a guide by dragging it out of the current view rather than having to zoom out and pull it off the side of the document altogether? I know about the guide manager but that’s an even clunkier method. Still loving the value for money aspect but with a few small tweaks, you’ll have Adobe running for the hills. Go for it!

Thankyou Aammppaa, points taken.

Thanks a lot! You were right. It was not a perfect circle anymore since I imported the shape from Inkscape to AD. And because of that the outline went crazy. I made a new circle and unified it with the shape and now it's good. Made me aware of other issues with the document. Thanks for that aswell! 

This looks like a glitch, perhaps caused by having multiple nodes at the same / very similar locations. I would have to examine the file to be sure.
I am not sure why you have so many short straight lines approximating a circle. Was this shape exported from a different piece of software?
I'd recommend redrawing this part of the image with the ellipse tool so that you get a clean line with as few nodes as possible.

It's a really good start, but to improve I'd suggest looking at some reference photos.
Also...
Consistency in lighting.
The reflections should all be pointing towards the same light source. Contact shadows.
Whenever two things touch there is going to be a shadow at the join. Variety.
All the droplets are exactly the same shape, and in a flat plane parallel to the viewer/screen. Which looks too perfect. Specular colour.
The reflected light on the droplets is too white. It should pick up some of the colour of the material itself. Here's an example of an illustration that shows these points in action...
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/lollipops-set-colorful-cake-pops-on-570081067

Hi @Gianni Becattini,
1/ You can create a brush.
or
2/ Use the "Appearance" panel to add a second, finer stroke of the desired color to which you apply a Gaussian blur.

Draw your curve. Duplicate it a number of times. Select all the copies. Layer > Geometry > Merge Curves. Add text to path. Use the handles to limit the text to the top of the path. The attached file has history saved, so you can step through what I did.
Text Path Multiple Curves.afdesign
Worth noting that the curves remain editable, so you can add / remove lines as needed, and reshape.

Oops. Forgot I was testing the 1.9 beta. 
Here is a version for 1.8 
However, this version seems to leave one letter on the preceding line, no matter where I put the handles...?
A bug that has been fixed in 1.9 perhaps.
Text Path Multiple Curves (Retail).afdesign

To keep it all as vectors you might also consider using multiple strokes as appearances:

 
boardgame.afdesign