Please can stroke width adjustments affect nested shapes!

[rnbutler87]

Hi,

Please see the video for a better description of what I mean.

https://www.loom.com/share/9f45690b749843728a3584690db2ebdb

Basically, I thought this was a bug a few years ago when I started using Affinity Designer and I posted on this forum but the response was that this is by design.

But I've just done another book with tens and tens of characters. And it is SOO hard to change the stroke weight of all the characters because all the nested shapes are not affected. It is simply not feasible to go in to each instance of a character and drill down, change the lineweight of the nested shapes every time. 

Characters need to have variable line weights so that they can be placed in different scenes and make sure their line weights are appropriate for the context. And the reason that I nest shapes inside other shapes instead is for economical reason. For example, if I want to make slight adjustments to characters, in a turnaround for example, I can just move the internal shapes around to create a slightly different angle on the character, for example front, front 3/4 and side angles. Nesting shapes in their parent shapes means you don't have to mess around with masks. If the parent shape changes, you have to make sure that the mask is also changed. It would just be so much simpler, quicker and make production so much more efficient if nested shapes were able to have their stroke changed with the parent.

PLEASE can you make a tick box or something to have stroke width affect all nested shapes, just like there is a tick box for 'Lock Children' when scaling

I would be eternally grateful.

Many thanks.

[loukash]

35 minutes ago, rnbutler87 said:

go in to each instance of a character and drill down, change the lineweight of the nested shapes every time

As of v1.9.x you can use the Select > Select Same > Stroke Weight, which may help a bit.
Or give all nested shapes the same name – e.g. "nested" – while you're nesting them in the Layers panel. Then use Select > Select Same > Name

[sfriedberg]

This is another situation where proper object graphic styles (not what Affinity currently calls graphic styles) would help tremendously.  You'd assign one style to all the curves which need to have the same stroke width, regardless of how the curves are grouped, nested, or even what pages they are on.  Then you'd make one change to the style and all the curves assigned to that style would instantly update.

This is, for strokes and fills, exactly the sort of behavior you get from text styles for text, and is the behavior most vector graphic programs provide under the name "graphic style".  Affinity really needs to supplement their current "preset" behavior with actual assignable, live graphic styles.

My 1st paragraph simplifies a little bit, because you have both strokes and fills to consider.  So you'd want build a graphic style hierarchy which lets you distinguish all the various different regions on your characters, using inheritance to make it as simple as possible to update stroke widths.

[rnbutler87]

On 3/19/2021 at 12:20 AM, loukash said:

As of v1.9.x you can use the Select > Select Same > Stroke Weight, which may help a bit.
Or give all nested shapes the same name – e.g. "nested" – while you're nesting them in the Layers panel. Then use Select > Select Same > Name

Thank you, that’s a good call I’ll give that a try for future designs

 

On 3/19/2021 at 1:13 AM, sfriedberg said:

This is another situation where proper object graphic styles (not what Affinity currently calls graphic styles) would help tremendously.  You'd assign one style to all the curves which need to have the same stroke width, regardless of how the curves are grouped, nested, or even what pages they are on.  Then you'd make one change to the style and all the curves assigned to that style would instantly update.

This is, for strokes and fills, exactly the sort of behavior you get from text styles for text, and is the behavior most vector graphic programs provide under the name "graphic style".  Affinity really needs to supplement their current "preset" behavior with actual assignable, live graphic styles.

My 1st paragraph simplifies a little bit, because you have both strokes and fills to consider.  So you'd want build a graphic style hierarchy which lets you distinguish all the various different regions on your characters, using inheritance to make it as simple as possible to update stroke widths.

Thank you, yes this would be ideal to have styles like this, hopefully affinity implements something like this!