Butler To Cats

Hi Brian! Guided by the tools down the side in that video and a little experimentation: Create a vector shape in Draw Persona. Convert to Curves. Add an effect e.g. 3D Switch to Pixel Persona. Choose the Eraser tool and a brush (something hard-edged if you want it to be more "vector-ish"). Erase as desired - the 3D effect adapts to the remaining shape.

If you move your cursor just outside the lines of the selected text box (Artistic or Frame text), you should see it change to the 4-way arrow move cursor that allows you to click and drag the text around. Be precise, there are other mouse cursor options available depending on where your cursor is located in relation to the box nodes, or move too far away from the line and you are ready to add a new text box. Alternatively, you can change to the Move tool and drag the text around like any other object.

Just a quick test, they are exporting with alpha for me: TIFF alpha channel: PSD imported into Moho, retaining layers and alpha information for each layer:

Hi Tom! Mind giving step-by-step details on your process? (and platform - Mac or Windows?) Version (Help menu, About - unless it's the specific application menu on a Mac) Are you using shortcut keys or menus? Are you automatically hitting the Delete key (or some simulation of it) which in some contexts (depending on your version of Photoshop, and whether the background had been converted to a layer) would confusingly either fill with background colour or bring up a fill dialog, while in Affinity Designer or Photo the Delete key quite sensibly deletes the selected area (because that's what a Delete key is meant to do, dash it all). For example, in Affinity Photo (1.5.1.54, Windows): Freehand Selection Tool (lasso) Select an area. Select menu, Invert Pixel Selection (or default shortcut equivalent, Ctrl+Shift+I). On another layer, paint in the now selected area. In Affinity Designer (1.5.2.58, Windows): Add a new Pixel layer Use the Freehand Selection Tool (lasso) Select menu, Invert Pixel Selection (or default shortcut equivalent, Ctrl+Shift+I). Paint in the now selected area.

For a different angle, you can draw a white "donut" shape between the two black circles to visually "trim" the inner circle (over-pasting). Alternatively, you can use an ellipse as a vector mask for the bitmap layer, trimming the inner picture by hiding everything outside the inner image area (cutting), including the roughness. I have vector scissors, so everything looks like vector paper.

Make sure no areas are selected. Deselect if required. Duplicate the mask if you also want to retain it as a mask. Right-click on the thumbnail icon and Release Mask should do it. Alternatively, just drag the mask thumbnail out to a "normal layer" location, and it will become a normal layer.

Use the node tool. Select both curves (click one, Shift-click the second curve), then join curves button should work fine. (It will use a line to join the two closest end nodes, the points do not have to be directly on top of each other).

Try duplicating the shape (Edit menu, Duplicate), select with the Move tool, click and hold on a corner node of the transform box, hold down Shift and Ctrl (Cmmd on a Mac?), and drag inwards to scale down around the object centre.

I can get something a little similar if I set my renderer to WARP (software-based, slower). Edit menu, Preferences, Performance, check if the Renderer drop-down is using your graphics card/chip or the slower WARP renderer. Probably not relevant, given the vector nature of the program, but I'm paranoid: Is that a custom grid? What are your document dimensions? Click the background (no selection), click Document Setup (top left), and change the document units to pixels.

Just drag the image "layer" (object) onto the text "layer" (object) in the layer panel.

(Ninja'd by pixelrain!) A graphics tablet is like a mouse, it controls the cursor movement on the screen. Unlike a mouse, it also sends varying pressure information when you press and drag (like click-and-drag with a mouse). Some artists describe using the tablet's special pen (most tablet pens have a plastic nib which makes no marks, it doesn't physically "draw") as drawing (on the screen) with a pencil (or brush) again instead of drawing with a half-brick (the mouse). You look at the screen while "drawing" on the tablet. Like a mouse, there is no way of drawing separately on most graphics tablets. This is what you get with with an Intuos tablet. There are some hybrid exceptions. Wacom (and a few others) makes a few pen/tablet combinations (the Spark, Folio, and Slate) where the pen also contains a custom ballpoint pen tip that writes on paper and the standalone tablet does record the pen movement. These are designed more for note taking than for graphics, and usually have poorer pressure sensitivity. There are also tablet computers where some models (such as the Surface range) have the digitizer (the graphics tablet technology) built into the monitor screen (and the rest of the laptop-like computer is also packed behind the screen), so you draw directly (with a special pen) onto the screen in the software workspace rather than the mouse-like graphics tablets where you draw on your desk while looking at the screen. You still get that pencil-like control and pressure sensitivity rather than just a touch screen without pressure sensitivity. Similarly, there are a range of hybrid tablet-monitors which allow you to draw directly onto the screen, but need to be plugged into a separate computer. Lastly there are iPad and Android tablets which are like over-sized phone technology, but some (such as the iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil and the Samsung Note range) have digitizer technology so they work like a tablet computer, and increasing power and sophistication is making newer models more equivalent to a tablet computer.

If you start with a blank Affinity Designer program (no files open), on Windows you can drag multiple SVGs at once from the File Explorer onto the empty working area (I assume the same will work from Mac Finder), and each SVG file will open in a separate file with tabs above the working area to change between them, close them, etc (you might not want to add hundreds at a time or it might get unwieldy). For each SVG file open, you can select the shapes you want to add (or Ctrl+A for all) and use the subcategory drop-down to add the selected parts as an asset (separate shapes will add as separate assets, groups will add as a single asset). Once you have assets on the Assets panel, you can export an entire category (with subcategories) as an .afassets file that will be importable (at least into Designer, I haven't tried with Photo).

Line weight from pressure already exists for both vector and raster brushes, although whether it will work with the new drawing mode remains unknown so far. However, "Works with raster and vector brush tools" sounds promising.

By default Affinity Designer works in vector mode (Draw Persona). To get your normal image tools, change to Pixel Persona (although keep in mind that at heart AD is a vector design program with raster features, Affinity Photo might be a better match for image manipulation features).

Workaround: (Note: even after adding text, you can still use the node tool to modify the shape, and text will reflow to fit)

If you don't want image tiling, and you are using Artistic text, you can also drag an image layer onto/into a text layer (without converting to curves). The blue "hint rectangle" should partially cover the width of the layer list/tree (but not the thumbnail image). If the blue rectangle covers the entire width (including the thumbnail image), you have gone too far and are dragging the image layer below the text. If it is a very small rectangle, you are dragging it onto the text layer thumbnail image where it becomes a rectangular image-sized mask for the text layer, the opposite of what you want (solution: drag more to the right).

Another technique: Try holding spacebar then quick-double-tap-and-drag on the trackpad (i.e. leave your finger on the trackpad with the second tap), which is the equivalent of click-and-drag on almost all Windows trackpads (i.e. does not need holding the left-click button). Experiment with drawing rectangles to see a visual feedback of whether it works (the double-tap needs to be relatively fast, although it might depend on your mouse double-click settings).

In Draw Persona, when you have the Pencil tool selected (smooth Solid line style), there is a Controller drop-down at the top of the working area, make sure it is set to Pressure (or Automatic seems to work for most cases). In Draw Persona, with the Vector Brush tool selected (fancy Texture line styles), the same applies, but first double-click (in the brush list) on the actual brush you are using and make sure the Size Variance slider is set high enough for the Pressure controller to actually make a difference. In Pixel Persona, with a Pixel layer selected, with the Paint Brush tool selected, there is a Pressure toggle button at the top of the workspace that needs to be on (its icon looks like a brush tip with ripple rings around it). Works fine here with a Surface Pro 3. (Now that I think about it, I had also previously installed the optional Wintab driver for a paint program that uses the old Wintab pressure system supplied by the tablet manufacturer - I don't think you need that for Designer, I think it is using the newer Ink/TabletPC pressure interface built into Windows, but thought I'd mention it, just in case)

Affinity Photo, Photo Persona, which is designed for manipulating existing images, has a magic wand tool with tolerance, looks like a magic wand icon but it is called the Flood Select tool. However, it sounds like you are using Affinity Designer, designed (in my viewpoint) for creating your own images (mostly vector-based) from a blank canvas, in which case your current technique, followed by the wonderful adjustment brush and other options under the Refine button (really worth playing around with them, especially useful when the background you are selecting from is not a plain uniform colour), is one choice. For another technique, try (Pixel Persona) the Select menu, Select Sampled Colour. It is somewhat similar to a non-contiguous magic wand, with a tolerance slider. If you have background colours on the areas you wish to retain, you might potentially want to paint out any unwanted selection areas afterwards with the Selection Brush in Subtract mode. You can also manually create a mask with the vector tools under the Draw Persona. There are probably other techniques, but hopefully this (and the Select Sampled Colour option) will get you on your way.

Well, you could set each layer up as a slice, but without manually resizing each slice that will export as only the size of the object(s) on the "layer". Good for exporting pieces for cut-out animation but not for exporting same-sized images for a sequence. If you were to duplicate an "image-sized" rectangle as the background/sizer, and use "real" layers (the ones labelled layer, not "object layers"), you could set up standard-sized "real layer" slices, but I don't know if the extra work would be worth it. With images that have a limited set of colours, static non-animated GIF images can be better quality (and possibly smaller in some cases) than a corresponding lossy JPG image.

Regarding Note-2, you can work around this with a few more steps (probably takes more time to describe it than it takes to do it). Add a new pixel layer and select it Change to the Pixel Persona Use the Selection Brush tool Set it to Snap to edges, All layers, and a size smaller than the intersection triangle area. Drag a little inside the intersection triangle You might want to use the Select menu, Grow/Shrink to expand the selection by 1 pixel or thereabouts. Use the bucket Flood Fill tool on the selected area Deselect Place the pixel layer underneath the triangles, so the triangles obscure any tiny imperfections in the fill edge.

Dabbling with character design in Affinity Designer and mostly cutout (with deformation) animation in Moho (see animation examples, not mine, in the Moho gallery). So far I have only done some very basic tests - works well with PNG layers/slices, layered PSD (use Final Cut Pro preset to preserve the layer structure), and SVG (currently imports as a single "flattened" vector layer). Serif would have to do a mountain-load of work to compete with the character animation features in Moho. For motion graphics stuff maybe not so much work, but I believe Serif have ruled out animation features in AD (and, I assume, AP) in the near future. And, yes, separate licenses for AP too - the two purchase systems cannot talk to each other. (As for game elements, not my area at all but, from what I've seen in passing, both vector and bitmap programs are in use, or both together, partly depending on game style and artist skill areas. If I had to estimate numbers I'd guess wildly that bitmap probably holds about a 3:1 lead, based on the incredibly inaccurate technique of googling game art photoshop and game art illustrator and comparing numbers of results)

In addition to Alfred's advice, if you are still looking for a tutorial, see this one: vimeo.com/162509010 Frame text is covered from about 2:53 to about 4:43 Lots of useful Serif tutorials (text tutorials in section 9) listed at the top of this thread: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/10815-in-house-affinity-designer-video-tutorials/ If you are working with text, and your screen/window is wide enough, you can also quickly get to the Paragraph and Character panels by clicking the Character and Paragraph buttons on the context toolbar across the top.

Is hiding/showing all layers so you can hide all then individually show just a few layers? Side note: you can Alt-click on a group, layer, or object to temporarily hide all others and only show that group/layer/object (only for a quick preview, doing much else other than changing things such as colour/stroke/style will automatically show all the other layers again, and it doesn't seem to work with Alt-click if the layer is already selected).

A few options while trying to guess what you mean (you might want to post more detail on your problem, preferably with examples, if none of these addresses your question): If you have created a transparency mask in Affinity (either Affinity Photo or Affinity Designer) by dragging one layer onto the thumbnail of another layer (in the layers panel), you can right-click on the mask thumbnail image in the thumbnail and select Release Mask (note: you must right-click directly on the thumbnail, not on the general layer area). I think the Mac uses Ctrl-click as an alternative if you do not have a two-button mouse? To create a new blank file with transparency in Affinity Designer or Affinity Photo, be sure to tick the Transparent Background checkbox. To erase areas of an image in Affinity Photo, you can use selection tools and the Delete key on a keyboard, or the various eraser tools as shown below (and other techniques such as masking). In Affinity Designer you can use the Pixel Persona and the Erase Brush tool to erase areas from an image or object (and masking and no doubt other techniques). To save a file with transparency, you need to export in a format that supports transparency (such as PNG-24 - Affinity automatically recognises and includes transparent area information in the edited image), and not export in a format that does not support transparency (such as JPG/JPEG). How you would set up FastStone viewer to show transparency in the exported image, I also have no idea (I prefer IrfanView as my image viewer) - you might have to ask FastStone.