Make guides

[TrevReav]

Hi, Is it possible to make guides from a object drawn in Affinity Designer 2?

The scenario being, I draw a circle, want to make it a guide for transforming 'tick' marks around it like a clock. I realise I can do this by having a pale circle on a locked layer and do the tick marks above, but…………

Thanks

[GarryP]

I’ve attached a quick video showing how to do what I think you want to do.
If that’s not it then you might need to give more details.

Setting pretty much all of the Snapping settings to ON will help you with this (I can’t remember which one/set actually helps).

Note: The function you need is Power Duplicate (look for it in the Help).

[TrevReav]

Hi Gary, that's great. I didn't know about Power Duplicate, so that's marvellous.

However, my question was really to see if there's any way of making your grey circle into a circular guide (as in Illustrator, select shape > make guide)?

But thanks very much for taking the time to do the video, apprev=ciated.

[GarryP]

There’s no way to make guides from shapes, only vertical and horizontal lines.
(Grids can have non-vertical/horizontal lines but they aren’t always useful as guides, depending upon the requirements at the time.)

However, there’s usually a way to do what you want, but differently, using snapping and different tools.

If you can give us a scenario which you’re having a problem with then someone can probably advise further.
The more detail you can give the better.

[TrevReav]

Morning Gary, thanks again. You've answered the question really. Ir was something similar to the clock face I was doing.
In Illustrator, I would have drawn a circle, made it into a guide shape, then used this as my basis. 
In your example, you did a grey circle on s ;sort snd did the tick marks above it. As you say usually a way!

One last question, using the tick marks as an example - Is there any way to designate how many degrees to rotate the line?

[GarryP]

You can use the Transform Panel to set the rotation amount precisely to any value.
(If anyone is wondering, in my video I used the SHIFT modifier key to constrain the rotation to 15 degree increments.)

[TrevReav]

Gotcha, that's great thanks.

The big things I learned from you were Power Duplicate and how to set the transform origin, so thanks very much for taking the time.

I'll call it 'case closed'.

[GarryP]

You’re welcome.

There are loads of ‘hidden’ things in the Affinity applications – I read about them on an almost-daily basis, so much to learn – so please don’t hesitate to ask whether something is possible, because it usually is, somehow.

One of the best things to do is to move the mouse pointer over something on the canvas and look at the Status Bar. There are all kinds of extra functionalities shown there which are not obvious. E.g. Rotating and resizing a layer at the same time by (on Windows) holding the right-mouse-button while dragging a handle, maybe with CTRL also to rotate and resize about the centre of the layer.

Basically, there’s a load of stuff in there which isn’t immediately obvious.