Locking the scale/dimensions of an asset

[Andy-R]

Hi all

I'm new(ish) to affinity designer, and this forum, so apologies if this is a simple question! I have searched past posts but can't seem to find the answer...

Is there a way to lock the scale/dimensions of an asset in designer?

I use designer to create scale plans of sites or arenas, but have to work with various different scales for documents. I have setup lots of different assets that I use regularly so that I can quickly drop them into the site plans without having to re-draw them each time. However, they always automatically re-size to match the scale of the drawing and I am trying to find a way to lock them to the dimensions that I set.

For example, if I have a box that's 300mm x 600mm, I always want it to be that size regardless of whether I drop it into a document with a scale set at 1:10 or 1:100 (currently, if I drop it into a 1:10 scale document, it re-sizes itself to 3000 x 6000mm!)

I have nearly 100 assets, so reducing them back to the right size each time is a time consuming exercise (as they don't always get dropped into the drawing at the same time so I can't usually select all and re-scale the whole layer/multiple object in one go!)

Any tips would be much appreciated.

Thanks

[Dazzler]

hmm I see your issue - you'd think there would be a preference for that, but I can't find one. It seems to just be altering the dimension rather than rescaling the object when you paste it in.

As a workaround, what you could do is set up some assets libraries with the assets resized at the various scales - so you could place all the assets on a page, resize them all as a whole and then add them to the asset panel in a library named for a particular scale (say 1:10 assets). A little bit of a job setting that up I know, but adding items to the assets panel is incredibly easy and you can actually just grab all the items at once and chuck in there, so long as they are all individually grouped into their items. So really it's just a matter of placing all your original elements to a page, select them all and resize them all to the scale (/10 for example) then drag them all the the assets category you make for 1:10 scale. Also as you are creating your assets make sure your stroke settings have 'scale with object' ticked so that the lines don't get ridiculously thick when you scale them down.

 

[Andy-R]

2 hours ago, Dazzler said:

hmm I see your issue - you'd think there would be a preference for that, but I can't find one. It seems to just be altering the dimension rather than rescaling the object when you paste it in.

As a workaround, what you could do is set up some assets libraries with the assets resized at the various scales - so you could place all the assets on a page, resize them all as a whole and then add them to the asset panel in a library named for a particular scale (say 1:10 assets). A little bit of a job setting that up I know, but adding items to the assets panel is incredibly easy and you can actually just grab all the items at once and chuck in there, so long as they are all individually grouped into their items. So really it's just a matter of placing all your original elements to a page, select them all and resize them all to the scale (/10 for example) then drag them all the the assets category you make for 1:10 scale. Also as you are creating your assets make sure your stroke settings have 'scale with object' ticked so that the lines don't get ridiculously thick when you scale them down.

 

That's not a bad workaround for now - I'll set that up, thanks for the suggestion!

I regularly add new assets with each project, so i'lll have to repeat the process every now and then, but it's still faster than doing them individually.