Bending a group

[Greyfox]

I have a group of shapes that together form a rectangular ribbon in Designer.

What I want to be able to do is to apply a slight "S" bend to the grouped object, but still retain it as an editable vector object.

If it was a single rectangle I could convert it to curves, and use the node tool, but that doesn't seem to work with a grouped object.

Any ideas ?

 

 

 

Ribbon.afdesign

[firstdefence]

I know this sounds crazy but there is no method or tool that will allow you to easily bend/warp vectors in Affinity. There are tedious long-winded node editing methods but nothing that would make it as simple as pulling and pushing a few nodes.

[Greyfox]

1 hour ago, firstdefence said:

I know this sounds crazy but there is no method or tool that will allow you to easily bend/warp vectors in Affinity. There are tedious long-winded node editing methods but nothing that would make it as simple as pulling and pushing a few nodes.

Thank you for the response. That is very disappointing. 
I'd even settle for trying some "tedious long-winded node editing methods" if that could achieve what I need.

[Dazmondo77]

Copy paste it into the VectorStyler beta (free download) it's a very clunky interface and not very pleasurable to use, but it has all the basic tools you would expect for vector design so you may have to have a play around with it, the vector distortion ability is amazing and really quick and should just copy paste back into Affinity - yes very very frustrating but until we get this massive omission in Affinity - theres not much else you can do unless you have an old copy of Illustrator (I use CS5) Freehand, CoralDraw and all the others

[John Rostron]

1 hour ago, Greyfox said:

Thank you for the response. That is very disappointing. 
I'd even settle for trying some "tedious long-winded node editing methods" if that could achieve what I need.

As a tedious, long-winded method, try this:

1. Create a rectangle that covers your existing shapes (or use the geometry operations on a copy of your shapes).
2. Convert this rectangle to curves and shape it to the desired S-bend.
3. Use the node editor to drag nodes from your shapes to fit withing your distorted rectangle.

John

[catlover]

Could you provide an example of what you want the final ribbon to look like ?

[Greyfox]

@John Rostron, @Dazmondo77

Thanks for your replies.

After some struggling to come to grips with it, I've been able to do what I wanted using Inkscape. It has path effects which allow both bending of groups, and also perspective envelopes.
At the moment I'm just running it as a Portable App, but will probably eventually install it as it does have some nice features. 

 

 

[Greyfox]

15 hours ago, catlover said:

Could you provide an example of what you want the final ribbon to look like ?

Here is an example based on the file I posted initially.

 

ShapedRibbon.svg