Affinity Designer Import drawing from Affinity to Toon Boom

[rodsal23]

Please need a tutorial how to import my characters created from Affinity designer into toon boom to animate

[Pšenda]

You mean "Export" characters/drawings from ADesigner?

https://affinity.help/designer/en-US.lproj/pages/ShareSavePrint/export.html

https://affinity.help/designer/en-US.lproj/pages/ExportPersona/exportPersona.html

[rodsal23]

I'm not quite satisfied with toon boom's brushes and effects, I'm new to it, I'm quite familiar with affinity so I would like to create my characters here then export to toon boom to animate but I couldn't find any tutorial even on YouTube on how to do it.

[Pšenda]

Try search:

https://www.google.com/search?q=toon+boom's+site%3Aforum.affinity.serif.com

[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. 
 

 

[Pšenda]

6 hours ago, DigitalDesignDude said:

but it still can be a little tedious without the ability to use Affinity Photos's batch jobs feature

You can open the *.afdesign document in APhoto (or transfer it using the Edit in Photo command) and try using the batch jobs. Alternatively, you can try using some OS-level automation tool, something like https://www.autohotkey.com.