Affinity Designer Import to Toon Boom

[rodsal23]

Can somebody please elaborate on how to import Affinity designer designs to toon boom for animation? Thanks

[Lee D]

I've not used Toon Boom but would expect the workflow to be similar for most exports. Check to see which file formats they support, compared to the ones Affinity Designer can export to and the decide which is better for your workflow.

[DDesignDude]

 I've made a video showing a potential way of importing Affinity Designer vector art into Toon Boom while retaining the project's layer order.

Unfortunately, Toon Boom doesn't recognize separate layers from PDF files exported from Affinity Designer. And the only other vector file types that can be imported into Toon Boom are SWF and Illustrator files. So the only workaround I know for Affinity Designer is to export each layer as individual PDFs and then re-assemble them into Toon Boom.

I have optimized the process as much as I can by numbering my layers so that they maintain the proper order automatically, but it still can be a little tedious without the ability to use Affinity Photos's batch jobs feature or script automation in V1 of Affinity Designer (As far as I know).

I've also run into scaling issues when importing the PDF file into Toon Boom and have a workaround for that as shown in my video.

None of this extra work is needed when importing Illustrator (.AI) files instead since Toon Boom is built with basic Illustrator file compatibility and can recognize its topmost layers with no issues.