How can I achieve this effect easily?

[emmmi]

See how the letter E wraps around the W, almost like a hook? I spent like a solid 20 minutes, trying to figure out how to do this. As you can see, I just created a new layer with that hook part of the letter E and placed it on top of the W. Is there a more efficient way to achieve this "wrap around" effect without that weird layering technique I used?

A total beginner here😬

WILDe Logo.afdesign

Edited December 13, 2020 by emmmi

[GarryP]

One way would be to edit the “W” instead of creating a new layer for the ‘hook’.
Layers cannot be both above and below another layer so I don’t think you can get what you want without some editing.

[emmmi]

2 minutes ago, GarryP said:

One way would be to edit the “W” instead of creating a new layer for the ‘hook’.
Layers cannot be both above and below another layer so I don’t think you can get what you want without some editing.

Ah I see, thank you. Any suggestions on how I can edit the "W"?

[GarryP]

Very carefully.
Attached is a very-crudely-drawn example.
The more time you take on it the better it should be.

There may be ways to use the Geometry functions (and others) to get something better but I don't think those will be quick techniques.

[G13RL]

You can duplicate the line, place the copy above the W. Then draw a shape on the overlap and merge the top line into the shape's thumbnail.

[emmmi]

54 minutes ago, G13RL said:

You can duplicate the line, place the copy above the W. Then draw a shape on the overlap and merge the top line into the shape's thumbnail.

Omg thank you!!!

 

Btw, do you have these weird lines too? 

[G13RL]

@emmmiI don't have a line. Did you draw the shape without filling and without contour? Sorry, I didn't specify this in my message!

[emmmi]

39 minutes ago, G13RL said:

@emmmiI don't have a line. Did you draw the shape without filling and without contour? Sorry, I didn't specify this in my message!

Yeah I did not use stroke or color for the shape but the lines are still there. This also happens when I align two squares, for example, side by side. Idk. Anyways, thank you for the help

[lepr]

 

1 hour ago, emmmi said:

Btw, do you have these weird lines too? 

 

Those grey artefacts result from the rendering pipeline in combination with the clipping shape's path not lying precisely on the boundary of document pixels.

You are getting the antialiased clipped border of the white stroke blended with the antialiased clipped border of the black fill (the fill spreads to half the width of the centre-aligned stroke), producing semi-opaque grey, and then that is blended with white of the lower object.

There are a couple of ways to prevent the artefacts:

• either make the clipping shape be a rectangle that is precisely aligned with the document pixel grid so that the antialiasing does not occur and therefore no grey occurs at the clipping border
• or use a vector mask on the object instead of nesting the object inside a clipping shape.

The vector mask solution works, even when the masking shape is not a pixel-aligned rectangle, because the rendering proceeds differently for a masked object versus a clipped object:

• when an object is clipped, its clipped stroke is composited with its clipped fill and then that result is blended with the underlying composite
• when an object is masked, its entire stroke is composited with its entire fill and then that result is clipped to the mask and blended with the underlying composite.

 

[emmmi]

15 minutes ago, anon2 said:

 

 

Those grey artefacts result from the rendering pipeline in combination with the clipping shape's path not lying precisely on the boundary of document pixels.

You are getting the antialiased clipped border of the white stroke blended with the antialiased clipped border of the black fill (the fill spreads to half the width of the centre-aligned stroke), producing semi-opaque grey, and then that is blended with white of the lower object.

There are a couple of ways to prevent the artefacts:

• either make the clipping shape be a rectangle that is precisely aligned with the document pixel grid so that the antialiasing does not occur and therefore no grey occurs at the clipping border
• or use a vector mask on the object instead of nesting the object inside a clipping shape.

The vector mask solution works, even when the masking shape is not a pixel-aligned rectangle, because the rendering proceeds differently for a masked object versus a clipped object:

• when an object is clipped, its clipped stroke is composited with its clipped fill and then that result is blended with the underlying composite
• when an object is masked, its entire stroke is composited with its entire fill and then that result is clipped to the mask and blended with the underlying composite.

 

I LOVE YOU!❤️

[lepr]

1 minute ago, emmmi said:

I LOVE YOU!❤️

Thanks... I think.

[Alfred]

57 minutes ago, anon2 said:

The vector mask solution works, even when the masking shape is not a pixel-aligned rectangle, because the rendering proceeds differently for a masked object versus a clipped object:

• when an object is clipped, its clipped stroke is composited with its clipped fill and then that result is blended with the underlying composite
• when an object is masked, its entire stroke is composited with its entire fill and then that result is clipped to the mask and blended with the underlying composite.

Masking/cropping works fine here, where the objects are flat, but it wouldn’t work if you had a 3D effect (because the effect would taper off at the boundaries of the mask). You would have to use clipping instead, so that the effect is applied to the entirety of the clipped object and the clipping object defines a ‘clipview’ window restricting the visible amount of the underlying object.

[lepr]

2 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Masking/cropping works fine here, where the objects are flat, but it wouldn’t work if you had a 3D effect (because the effect would taper off at the boundaries of the mask). You would have to use clipping instead, so that the effect is applied to the entirety of the clipped object and the clipping object defines a ‘clipview’ window restricting the visible amount of the underlying object.

If 3D Layer Effect had been applied to the object being clipped, then the artefacts would never have occurred because the entire object would have been rendered before clipping, and there would have been no need for my suggestion of using masking instead of clipping.

[G13RL]

The applied relief is not a problem (see the W).
Problems occur if an external shadow or glow is applied to the relief shape: in the U on the right, a simple rectangle does not work, the fx stops at the edges of the mask, as @Alfred pointed out.
In the central U, the shape follows exactly the contours of the U and the line (if I remember correctly, I think it was @JimmyJack who proposed this way of doing things).

[lepr]

Returning to the OP's problem which features no outer glow or outer shadow effect...

The artefact plagued rendering when an object is clipped instead of masked is yet another rendering/compositing bug, in my opinion. But should I report it since that usually seems to guarantee a bug being allowed to persist for years? Maybe deliberately not reporting a bug is the charm that gets the bug fixed.

[v_kyr]

2 hours ago, anon2 said:

The artefact plagued rendering when an object is clipped instead of masked is yet another rendering/compositing bug, in my opinion. But should I report it since that usually seems to guarantee a bug being allowed to persist for years? Maybe deliberately not reporting a bug is the charm that gets the bug fixed.

Hmm  🤔  hard to tell, since I don't know how Affinity handles it's bugtracking procedure at all. - Meaning, how bugs found & reported by users are verified & prioritized, so if they all then are really entered into their bug tracking system. - In software dev (at least the fields I work in) fixing errors/bugs has always priority over possible feature implementations. The dev tools used here for collaboration and team work systems etc., usually clearly indicate still open bug tickets in contrast to feature request tickets.

[Alfred]

32 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Hmm  🤔  hard to tell, since I don't know how Affinity handles it's bugtracking procedure at all. - Meaning, how bugs found & reported by users are verified & prioritized, so if they all then are really entered into their bug tracking system. - In software dev (at least the fields I work in) fixing errors/bugs has always priority over possible feature implementations. The dev tools used here for collaboration and team work systems etc., usually clearly indicate still open bug tickets in contrast to feature request tickets.

You wrote about bug tracking before (and Patrick Connor replied):

 

[v_kyr]

2 hours ago, Alfred said:

You wrote about bug tracking before (and Patrick Connor replied)

Yip, but bug tickets have to be setup/created in Jira first, before they will be hopefully addressed (taken over) by some dev in dev sprints. Those tickets will then be further taken into account/in processing via  Bitbucket (a git based project code version management system) for keeping an active code management repository. - Therefore bug tickets have to be entered first!

[Alfred]

7 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Therefore bug tickets have to be entered first!

Of course, but we’ve frequently seen posts from Serif’s QA staff confirming that they could reproduce the bug (or asking for further information because they were struggling to reproduce it). Creating a new issue in their bug tracking system — or commenting on an existing issue — is the obvious next step.

[v_kyr]

12 hours ago, Alfred said:

Creating a new issue in their bug tracking system — or commenting on an existing issue — is the obvious next step.

That you have no insight/overview into/over and thus never know whether a bug has really been recorded and processed so far at all. - That is probably what anon2 meant here.

[lepr]

1 minute ago, v_kyr said:

What you have no insight/overview into/over and thus never know whether a bug has really been recorded and processed so far at all. - That is probably what anon2 meant here.

I was joking when I wrote, "But should I report it since that usually seems to guarantee a bug being allowed to persist for years? Maybe deliberately not reporting a bug is the charm that gets the bug fixed."

[v_kyr]

22 minutes ago, anon2 said:

I was joking when I wrote, "But should I report it since that usually seems to guarantee a bug being allowed to persist for years? Maybe deliberately not reporting a bug is the charm that gets the bug fixed."

Ah Ok, I thought it might have been something already reported time ago as a bug, but never has been addressed.

[lepr]

5 hours ago, v_kyr said:

Ah Ok, I thought it might have been something already reported time ago as a bug, but never has been addressed.

That would not be surprising,

[lacerto]

(...)

[lepr]

1 hour ago, Lagarto said:

As for clipping vs. masking, I seem to always get rasterized output when exporting to PDF whenever masking objects.

[...]

Can this somehow be avoided?

Yes. One thing is to not have a stroke on the vector mask. Another is to not use a Group as a mask. There will be more but I'm away from my graphics machine at the moment and do not want to post without checking.