Snapping problem...maybe

[Antony parks]

Good afternoon everyone,

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017), running Sierra with 16 gb of memory. Affinity Designer 1.9.1.

Having a problem finishing off a pattern I've been working on.There two screen shots attached and one as "exported"  jpeg, plus the affinity designer file.

On Artboard 1 (60 x 60 cm) I drew up one repeat as a tile. When this was near enough finished it was made into a symbol.

On Artboard 2 (also 60 x 60 cm) I divided the surface in 9 equal squares with guide lines. The symbol (the first tile ) was then dropped on Art board 2 and reduced to fit the centre 20 x 20 cm square as defined by the guide lines. Once reduced it was copied into the other squares. Now to get the repeat to work I drew leaves that were divided between two adjacent guide line squares.  (This also meant adding information to the symbol or the original tile.) The problem I'm having is that even with snapping on there is not a perfect join between the two halves of the leaves that straddle the guide line.  Most of today has been been spent trying get it to work properly without success.

Ivy03.jpg is Jpeg out put from Designer

Screen Shot 2021-03-07 at 16.19.50.png is close up of the joint problem as seen in Designer. Red elipses highlight the fault.

Screen Shot 2021-03-07 at 16.25.17.png  shows the two artboards

 

I also encountered a strange quirk that should not be a problem but is: I exported Artboard  2 to Jpeg, opened that in Affinity Photo, retouched the joint problems and saved the retouched version back to Jpeg. I then tried to download this to Society6.com to add to my artwork that is for sale there. Society 6 said the file was corrupt and could not be read, same result with a Png. Same result with a new file having rebooted everything.  I could view the files here with Preview and Lightroom.

Otherwise I am very happy that I have chosen Affinity! Loving It.

Yours ever

Antony Parks

 

 

 

ivy_03.afdesign

Edited March 8, 2021 by Antony parks
Changed screen shot

[taumi]

On 3/8/2021 at 12:16 AM, Antony parks said:

Good afternoon everyone,

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017), running Sierra with 16 gb of memory. Affinity Designer 1.9.1.

Having a problem finishing off a pattern I've been working on.There two screen shots attached and one as "exported"  jpeg, plus the affinity designer file.

On Artboard 1 (60 x 60 cm) I drew up one repeat as a tile. When this was near enough finished it was made into a symbol.

On Artboard 2 (also 60 x 60 cm) I divided the surface in 9 equal squares with guide lines. The symbol (the first tile ) was then dropped on Art board 2 and reduced to fit the centre 20 x 20 cm square as defined by the guide lines. Once reduced it was copied into the other squares. Now to get the repeat to work I drew leaves that were divided between two adjacent guide line squares.  (This also meant adding information to the symbol or the original tile.) The problem I'm having is that even with snapping on there is not a perfect join between the two halves of the leaves that straddle the guide line.  Most of today has been been spent trying get it to work properly without success.

Ivy03.jpg is Jpeg out put from Designer

Screen Shot 2021-03-07 at 16.19.50.png is close up of the joint problem as seen in Designer. Red elipses highlight the fault.

Screen Shot 2021-03-07 at 16.25.17.png  shows the two artboards

Have the same issue. 

[Antony parks]

Hi Taumi,

Thanks for your reply, Taumi..... I was beginning to get the impression there was no-one at home.

I can't understand why no-one seems to be taking notice of this problem. Or is no-one else having problems with it? And if this last case is true; what am I doing wrong?

Hallo, is anyone at home!

The problem is going to get worse if someone tries to make seemless repeats. Which incidently I was mulling over in my head.

My pattern needs to go up to something like 64 repeats which would be a pain in the proverbial to retouch in an output Png or Jpeg.

Can someone please explain what's going wrong !

Yours ever

Antony

Edited March 9, 2021 by Antony parks
Typos

[Antony parks]

Hi everyone.

It's me again. Here's a crop from the output Jpeg of a quick test that I have just done. Note there are two fine whitish lines, one vertical one horizontal, through the green.

 

This test was done as follows:

Opened an art board at 600 x 600 mm. Placed a central guide line horizontally and another vertically. Snapping was on, see screen shot. Drew one of my ivy leaves in four sections. Snapping to the guides. Dropped a pale pink background behind the leaf. Exported to Jpeg.  Still seeing a white(ish) line on the joints. You can also see the joints in Affinity Design as soon as you switch off the guides.

Enclosed:

Leaf_test.af design              the original afdesign file

Screen shot of the snapping setup

Leaf test close up

Output Jpeg file.

Now, have a nice day yous all, and tell me there's an answer to this problem.

Yours ever,

Antony

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leaf_test.afdesign

[Sean P]

Hi Antony parks,

Apologies for my delay in responding. Unfortunately this type of fringing issue is a common issue in vector, due to the way they're rendered/drawn on screen. For example after exporting your Leaf_test document to SVG Chrome will also show gaps between those objects at varying zoom levels, as does a series of 4 aligned rectangles exported to SVG from Illustrator. It is also particularly troublesome when exporting vector objects to pixel formats due to not everything lining up to the pixel bounds, which again causes anti-aliasing issues. However Illustrator does do some form of wizardry on screen and with its exporter that prevents this from appearing and there are a few things logged in the Feature Requests forum to improve this.

There are a couple methods you can use to help mitigate the problem.

The first of which is setting the 'Anti-aliasing' option in the Blend Ranges dialog to 'Force Off'. This will stop the objects being anti aliased when drawn. It is this anti-aliasing that is causing the hairlines to appear between the two objects. However the downside of this method is that it is very noticeable on curved objects as they begin to look very jagged. So this might not be an option you wish to use.

The second method is to just overlap the objects a little bit. There are a few ways to do this - the first is the obvious overlap them rather than snap them against each other. If you would rather keep the objects aligned to each other then you could actually just apply a very small stroke (the size of which will depend on your objects), but this will cause the snapped object's strokes to become overlapped and stop the fringing. Alternatively you can also use the Layer Effects to do a similar thing with the 'Outline' effect. This will essentially add an outline to your objects and stop the fringing.

I've attached a few files that demonstrate these methods for you to have a look into.

However with that said, the second method will not help for the scenario you wish to use them for (tiling symbol patterns). For that to work you really do need to be working in pixel dimensions, as opposed to centimetres - especially if your final output is to JPG/PNG. If you work in pixels you're then able to ensure all your edges are aligned to the pixel grid and when combined with the two snapping options: 'Force Pixel Alignment' and 'Move By Whole Pixels'. This will give you much better success when you then snap multiple symbols together.

I've had a taken your ivy_03 file and deleted Artboard 2 and then resized Artboard 1 (and the symbol) to be 6000x6000 (it divides by 3 better than 7000 and doesn't create any decimals) and then aligned it to a pixel grid. I then noticed that some of shapes were now no longer aligned to the edges. So I've selected all the groups and objects displaying as 5999.3px and rounded them up to 6000px (non-integer pixels in these scenarios are bad, as you want everything on the edge aligned to the pixel grid). Its worth noting that you may need to increase the number of decimal places in preferences to see this, otherwise the UI will round them up. 

Once that is done, the UI may still show the lines, but when you export to PNG they should have gone. See attached Ivy03_Resaved.afdesign and PNG. Whilst this might not be the answer you were looking for it should definitely help you out in the future. Its worth posting in the questions forum if you do get stuck as there are many other users willing to help!  

Lastly its worth checking out this article as well, despite being for iPad it should be easily adaptable to the desktop:
https://affinityspotlight.com/article/create-repeat-patterns-with-a-live-pattern-preview-in-affinity-designer-for-ipad/



 

Leaf_test_AAForceOff.afdesign Leaf_test_withStroke.afdesign ivy_03_Resaved.afdesign Leaf_test_withOutlineFX.afdesign

[Antony parks]

Hi Sean P

Yes; the file I send you was a mess by the time you opened it! Everything was a tiny bit out of size as I had tried over lapping and given up. Sorry about that, I saw all the mistakes on the file you had when I went back to it later on.

Ok; hadn't thought about the anti-aliasing...  That might also account for a lot of the artifacts in the output to Jpeg.  Your output looks remarkably clean without artifacts and joins.

Yes; all these sites for selling print on demand etc want Jpeg or Png; so, yes, I should be in pixels sizes.  My mistake.

I've tried gripping the segments with an outline but it was not very successful. Maybe because of the anti aliasing, but maybe also because the tiles overlap each over in layer priority.  We used to have problems "gripping and choking" way back when we were outputting line and ct to Scitex.....(early 90's).

But maybe it will work better with anti-aliasing off.

The heads-up for the article is useful too. She's taking a very similar route to mine but the corner and edge elements treatment and drawing is a lot slicker than mine. Much better strategy.

Thanks for your input.

I'll try a series of variations with all your suggestions and let you know what the results are like.

Thanks again, will come back to you.

Yours

Antony