Jump to content
You must now use your email address to sign in [click for more info] ×

Expand Stoke


Recommended Posts

Yep it seems to be much better now thanks team, that's a big issue dealt with!  Although it may be a tad heavy on the node count it's still pretty clean. :-)  Much better!

Screen Shot 2020-01-11 at 12.25.37 PM.png

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Staff

Hi Kevin,

If you have any examples where it is introducing nodes you think it shouldn't, can you send them to me? It should be *exactly* the number of nodes required - it works mathematically but with a tolerance and our tolerance is more accurate than the one in Illustrator which may occasionally produce an extra segment - but in theory if you took that segment away (and made it the same as the result from Illustrator) and zoomed in you'd start to notice the result doesn't match the source stroke as well... So I'm *very* interested in extra nodes - but perhaps only to validate that the extra nodes were actually needed - if it turns out they weren't then I have a problem to fix!... :/

Thanks!

Matt

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Gotcha Matt. You're most likely correct. I'm basing it on mostly a visual comparison with years in illustrator, not knowing the "behind the scenes" aspect you describe it's probably more accurate in Designer. The mantra was always the less nodes to make the desired shape, the better, to get the smoothest curves. But as I say I don't really know what's going on under the hood so to speak...   That tolerance accuracy as you describe just be adding a few more nodes than illustrator when all is said and done.  :) 

Thanks for the explanation.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@retrograde @MattP

Hmmm. You got much better results in converting your stroke to outline. Did you draw the stroked curve with the Pen tool or the Brush tool?

Using a Wacom tablet, I selected the Brush tool with a basic round brush and drew a freehand curve. I converted this curve to outline, and got 7-8 nodes at the end points – not the elegant 3 nodes that you got. Does it matter whether one uses the Pen or Brush tool?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Staff

@Mark Oehlschlager the start/end nodes are the most likely of all to have issues due to the fact that a freehand pencil/brush tool has lots of noise at the start/end. I suspect @retrograde used a Pen tool to create the source curves?

Using your pencil/brush freehand approach, if you cleaned up the start/end nodes and then hit expand stroke, you'd probably find the results make a lot more sense. I'm just trying to say that the result of the Expand Stroke is correct, but the input given to it (from using the Wacom) is noisy, so you get noisy data out at the end, if that makes sense?

Yes, I do wonder if the 'tolerance' of the fit could be a user-adjustable parameter... :) 

Matt

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 1/12/2020 at 1:13 PM, Mark Oehlschlager said:

@retrograde @MattP

Hmmm. You got much better results in converting your stroke to outline. Did you draw the stroked curve with the Pen tool or the Brush tool?

Using a Wacom tablet, I selected the Brush tool with a basic round brush and drew a freehand curve. I converted this curve to outline, and got 7-8 nodes at the end points – not the elegant 3 nodes that you got. Does it matter whether one uses the Pen or Brush tool?

@Mark Oehlschlager I used the pencil tool with stabiliser on "rope mode". Here is another example. The tighter the curve the more nodes occur in those areas... and yes the ends are still just the three nodes. :-)  Edit: this was using a mouse, not the tablet.

Screen Shot 2020-01-13 at 3.07.43 PM.png

Edited by retrograde
Added another thought
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 1/10/2020 at 7:29 PM, mac_heibu said:

Thank you for „re-inventing“ the „Expand Stroke“ command. Seems to work very fine now.

But, what puzzles me: There was so much criticism about this feature and now – no comment, no reaction … :) :)

I uttered a silent "Finally" to my monitor - it is essentially a bug fix in a beta I shouldn't use yet for production use. Not the introduction of a great new tool. ;)

  • "The user interface is supposed to work for me - I am not supposed to work for the user interface."
  • Computer-, operating system- and software agnostic; I am a result oriented professional. Look for a fanboy somewhere else.
  • “When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” ― Confucius
  • Not an Affinity user og forum user anymore. The software continued to disappoint and not deliver.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 hours ago, MattP said:

giphy.gif

:34_rolling_eyes: 

  • "The user interface is supposed to work for me - I am not supposed to work for the user interface."
  • Computer-, operating system- and software agnostic; I am a result oriented professional. Look for a fanboy somewhere else.
  • “When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” ― Confucius
  • Not an Affinity user og forum user anymore. The software continued to disappoint and not deliver.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I somehow just realized the beta for mac was out officially - not sure how I went a week not seeing that!

I tried out expand right away and was very happy with it. I also overlapped strokes, expanded and then divided with the boolean operation and it was quick and efficient and clean!!!!! No more crazy masses of useless nodes to clean up. Amazing!  Then I copied my expanded and divided strokes and pasted into my old copy of illustrator cs6 and there were NOT crazy amounts of extra nodes along the edge anymore! If I brought things made in Affinity over to illustrator in the past, it always turned into 1000's of extra nodes along the edge - No more! 
Whether this was simply a "bug fix" or a deeper issue, I don't care - it's SO MUCH better now. Matt P mentioned he was still modifying the divide boolean operation - so that's good news also 

Sometimes it's the "little" things that matter most!

The expand fix is huge for me - Right now I do what I can in Affinity and export or copy and paste it over to Illustrator for text warp, blob brush, pure vector brushes, vector eraser, etc. Getting closer all the time to being able to do all my professional work in Affinity.

Excited to see what other updates are coming in 1.8  Keep it up!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Staff
1 hour ago, Boldlinedesign said:

I somehow just realized the beta for mac was out officially - not sure how I went a week not seeing that!

Subscribe (use the follow option) to this thread and never miss another beta announcement...

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Guidelines | We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.