APhoto Pattern Layer -- selection/spacing issue

[a2jc4life]

What I'm trying to do is create a pattern of a shape that repeats.  It needs to have space between the repeated shapes, unlike for a typical repeating tile.

I can't seem to figure out how to make this happen, because I can't get my selection to include the entire canvas area of a layer.  So I have a shape in my source file.  I've expanded the canvas to provide the buffer I need.  I want to create a pattern layer from this to copy and paste into my destination file.  But no matter what I do, I can't get the program to select/create a pattern layer from the entire layer and not just the single object in the layer.  I've tried "select all," I've manually created a rectangular selection of the entire space, etc., and no matter what I have showing as selected, when it creates the pattern it includes only the shape itself.  (The background is transparent.)

Consequently, when I tile this pattern, the shapes are all butted up against each other, which isn't what I want.

Am I missing something?  Is there a workaround?

[Alfred]

Does the attached show the kind of result you want to achieve?

[a2jc4life]

Roughly, yes.

[GarryP]

One method I have found – and it’s cheating a bit – is to create the ‘frame’ with a very low Opacity (1%) and then Rasterize before using the result in a Pattern Layer – see attached video
This might not be good if you need things to be perfect – the 1% colour may interfere with other things – but it’s probably okay for most basic purposes.

If anyone can tell me how to rasterise something while keeping all of the transparent parts – even round the outsides – I’d be interested in hearing that as I just can’t figure out how to do it, after many attempts in many different ways.

[Alfred]

8 hours ago, a2jc4life said:

Roughly, yes.

Only roughly? Please tell us more!

[a2jc4life]

Only the details differ!  (It looks like yours is on the diagonal, for instance.)

I was able to "hack" my immediate project because the background is to be solid, so I just included the background in the pattern, but I would have preferred to be able to swap it out, so I'm hoping to sort out for next time whether I have other options for maintaining the transparency.  This is an example of what I made.  I wanted the white star to be its own layer, that I could place it over different colored backgrounds.  (The texture is an overlay added later.)

 

[Alfred]

Download and open the attached *.afphoto file, select the Star layer and ‘Merge Down’ via the Layers panel’s context menu. Choose the Move Tool if you want to resize and/or rotate the star.

Star-Pattern.afphoto

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, Alfred said:

Download and open the attached *.afphoto file, select the Star layer and ‘Merge Down’ via the Layers panel’s context menu. Choose the Move Tool if you want to resize and/or rotate the star.

So the trick is to create an empty pattern layer of the desired dimensions below the shape & then use Merge Down to retain the dimensions of the pattern layer?

I never would have figured that out on my own. ☹️

[Alfred]

9 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I never would have figured that out on my own. ☹️

I’m not even terribly sure how I discovered it!

[R C-R]

25 minutes ago, Alfred said:

I’m not even terribly sure how I discovered it!

I am glad you did. It makes the AP pattern feature much more useful to me ... almost as useful as if it worked with vector objects without rasterizing them. (You don't know of any tricks to do that do you?)

[Alfred]

46 minutes ago, R C-R said:

So the trick is to create an empty pattern layer of the desired dimensions below the shape & then use Merge Down to retain the dimensions of the pattern layer?

Thinking back, I did it the other way around: I created a pattern layer before I had even drawn any shapes, and then played with various ideas to see how to get a shape into the pattern layer. Because the Help on pattern layers tells you to draw with a Pixel Brush it looked as though I would need a raster object, so I initially rasterized my test shape, but that turned out to be unnecessary.

9 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I am glad you did. It makes the AP pattern feature much more useful to me ... almost as useful as if it worked with vector objects without rasterizing them. (You don't know of any tricks to do that do you?)

The star in my ‘Star-Pattern’ file isn’t rasterized.

[R C-R]

3 minutes ago, Alfred said:

The star in my ‘Star-Pattern’ file isn’t rasterized.

True, but after I used Merge Down it became part of the (Pattern) layer and as such I could not find a way to change it using vector or shape tools, only raster ones.

[Alfred]

12 minutes ago, Alfred said:

The star in my ‘Star-Pattern’ file isn’t rasterized.

 

5 minutes ago, R C-R said:

True, but after I used Merge Down it became part of the (Pattern) layer and as such I could not find a way to change it using vector or shape tools, only raster ones.

I’m afraid I hadn’t understood what you were getting at. I found the same, sadly.

[a2jc4life]

Oooh.  Clever.  I tried copying/pasting into a pre-existing pattern layer, but I didn't think to put it below and merge down.

I do think that a pattern layer is inherently a raster layer.

[R C-R]

7 minutes ago, a2jc4life said:

I do think that a pattern layer is inherently a raster layer.

Sadly, it seems so. Maybe in the future it will support vector shapes ... about the same time we get true vector brushes maybe?