Smart fill like Illustrator or Corel

[IJCT]

Hi guys, I noticed that we dont have a smart fill or fill shape tool like illustrator or corel do, any possibilities of having this?

 

[Pšenda]

"Hi guys, I noticed that we dont have a smart fill or fill shape tool like illustrator or corel do, any possibilities of having this?"
Yes, Boolean operation.

Edited April 5, 2021 by Pšenda

[Tupaia]

Hello!

'Boolean Divide' indeed works (which was a nice surprise) - but only when the objects are all closed.

However, if you use it on something like this...

... it will not work but delete the lines. So either I'm missing something, or there's still need for a smart fill tool.

 

[Pšenda]

41 minutes ago, Tupaia said:

still need for a smart fill tool.

Do you think that if Affinity can't perform Boolean operations on open shapes yet, this "magic" (alias smart) tool will solve it for them? Isn't it more necessary to implement this functionality - Boolean operations on open shapes, and then possibly use it for other tools?

[Medical Officer Bones]

I agree with the OP: a vector fill tool is very handy to have for quick artistic work, as well as kinda essential for architectural/map jobs.

Booleans is not the answer. Imagine having to use booleans on architectural drawings in vector format? Or scanned in b&w illustration traced to vector? Unthinkable, really. Impossible in actual practice.

CorelDraw, Illustrator, PhotoLine, Animate CC, OpenToonz, Inkscape... All have vector fill tools that allow for freely filling spaces with vector shapes. Serif's own Affinity Designer predecessor Draw Plus(?) had a similar feature I have read.

Heck, PhotoLine extends the regular fill tool to simply switch between bitmap or vector fill - with the option to overfill the edges to prevent seams. Inkscape also features a grow/shrink numeric input field to control this. Inkscape and OpenToonz also include a gap option! Both are open source and free...

I don't want to criticize the efforts of the Affinity team - they are doing an excellent job overall. It is, however, mystifying to me how a number of long-requested basic workflow features are seemingly continuously put on the back-burner.  Features which long have been part of the base toolkit of just about any members of the competition out there.

For now, if you need to quickly and efficiently fill with vector shapes: download Inkscape, do the job in Inkscape, and import the result in Designer.

Let's hope version 2 will finally, after years and years of patience and waiting, close all those smaller and bigger user experience gaps.

 

[loukash]

On 4/5/2021 at 10:32 PM, Tupaia said:

it will not work but delete the lines

Boolean operations on open curves are broken:

However, there is a quick'n'dirty workaround to set the open curves to microscopic stroke width of, say, 0.001 pt, then expand curves to get ultra thin closed path instead. Those will then accept all available boolean operations and behave almost like open paths with only minimal imprecision that shouldn't matter much in most scenarios.

Either that, or use e.g. the VectorStyler beta as your "Advanced Boolean Plugin". Copy & paste curves back and forth between both apps should usually work. Expect crashes in VectorStyler though. (Which should also remind us that 10000 features alone is not all that it needs to make a good app. )

Edited April 6, 2021 by loukash

[Medical Officer Bones]

@loukash Hey, that is actually a good idea! I copied the shapes from Designer into Inkscape, used the fill tool to quickly fill shapes, then copied them back into Designer.

Good tip. Because of legacy issues in the past related to copying and pasting vectors from one application to the next, I intuitively avoid such workarounds. But it works well enough here.

[loukash]

8 minutes ago, Medical Officer Bones said:

But it works well enough here.

Being on El Capitan, I still have a more or less working installation of Illustrator CS5. Apart from the CMYK clipboard bug, copying paths back and forth works fine.

[FunnyBunny]

+1

For the sake of efficiency.

 

[Medical Officer Bones]

I mainly work on Windows myself - and the clipboard used to be notoriously wonky for these types of copy and paste actions.

Luckily, we seem to be past those worries for the most part nowadays.

As for Adobe: through my work I have access to the Adobe suite. But aside from file conversions, I hardly use it anymore.