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Vector Flood Fill


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I would never have thought of flooding in Publisher, but since you mention it.... 🙂   you can flood the counters of letters (lower copy of item) but if you try to flood a letter( although it shows it is selected (blue border) it then floods the frame background.  Not useful to me but may be of interest in making the behaviour consistent. image.png.62f706974dcdb48e45385e5d35aae400.png

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Yes thanks for this - creating text frame fills is not the intended behaviour so we're going to look at making some changes to how this works with text. The result should really match what the hover highlight indicates (a bit more like what happens if you have converted the text to curves prior to the fill).

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My suggestion is that:
Add a Text Frame panel to Designer and Persona Designer and you don't need to do anything in Vector Flood Fill.
In this panel, you can then change or remove the text frame fill created with the Vector Flood Fill tool.

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1 hour ago, Ash said:

Yes thanks of this - creating text frame fills is not the intended behaviour so we're going to look at making some changes to ho this works with text. The result should really match what the hover highlight indicates (a bit more like what happens if you have converted the text to curves prior to the fill).

That's great! Reminds me of a limitation that may be related to this as well. When you attempt to link the colour of a vector with the colour of text, you instead fill the text background as well. Perhaps allowing each to be linked with each other could help with allowing text to be filled with this tool as well?

 

Can't link fills with text to change colour.gif

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  • 2 weeks later...

 Hi,

i tested the improvements in beta 2.1.0.1730. This tool is getting better and better and now works more like expected👍👍👍👍👍 Thanks 🥰

Even editable text and shapes and groups are respected. I guess it works best if the area of interest has no shapes in the background, so the flood will be stopped only by the enclosing (open) lines. Otherwise you have to fill the inner areas one by one and combine them at the end with boolean add to get a single shape.

One option i guess will be added in the future would be that the tool also takes in account the thickness of the vector lines. At the moment one has to convert the contours to get an even more complex fill. Would be nice to get this in a single shot without losing the editable bezier lines.

But so far this is really impressive.

By the way 😏 While testing with the grouped lines i thought it would be nice to have some kind of additional boolean montage mode that maintains all open lines (boolean add) but dynamically converts the contours to areas. This would have had the wanted effect in the lower example. But the beziers would still be editable.

At the moment in a montage all open lines are dynamically converted to closed shapes to have only areas in the boolean operations:

image.png.23aedfadb114be0a0cf7c1feee4df080.png

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Software: Affinity v1 - Designer/Publisher/Photo (1.10.6.1665), Affinity v2 (universal license) - Designer/Publisher/Photo, v2 betas.

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On 3/17/2023 at 10:56 AM, Designer1 said:

I know it might not be appropriate here, but I would really like to have […]

1 hour ago, Designer1 said:

The biggest problem in Affinity Designer is the poor export quality of PNG and JPG.

Please do not spam specific threads with off-topic issues. thanks

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4 minutes ago, Tishihtzu said:

I do not see this tool available. I am running Designer 2 2.0.4 and it says I am 'up to date'.

I really want to fill in that gator!

Hi Tishihtzu,

All of these are new features that are found in the 2.1 beta we're currently running. Please see this post below for guidance on how to report issues using the beta and how to enroll in the beta program.

Its worth bearing in mind that any document saved in 2.1 cannot be opened in 2.0.4, so I would advise making any copies of your documents before working on them in the beta! 

 

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Thank you for the reply. I have downloaded the beta and installed the tool to the tools; however, I guess I do not know how to use it. I am trying to fill in the gator; however, nothing seems to happen when I click inside the stroked paths. I have tried both insertion modes.2101739422_Screenshot2023-03-24at09_30_28.thumb.png.cb003446808e05a57f721ee0bd672be1.png

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41 minutes ago, Tishihtzu said:

Thank you for the reply. I have downloaded the beta and installed the tool to the tools; however, I guess I do not know how to use it. I am trying to fill in the gator; however, nothing seems to happen when I click inside the stroked paths. I have tried both insertion modes.

Hi Tishihtzu,

the tool does not work like the bitmap fill tool by just clicking somewhere in your drawing.

You have to select all lines that are relevant for your area of interest first. Then by hovering with the fill tool over the inner areas you will see some preview outline. This gives a hint, which areas will be detected as "fill zone". When clicking there the fill will finally be executed.

Something like this:

By the way, if there is a gap in the group of lines, the tool does not fill the area. All lines have to be either closed or form a closed area by overlaping each other somehow. If you have gaps in your drawing (only visible in the wireframe view mode) that prevent correct filling, you might duplicate your drawing and expand all strokes to areas. Then the chance that all inner areas are enclosed is much higher.

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Software: Affinity v1 - Designer/Publisher/Photo (1.10.6.1665), Affinity v2 (universal license) - Designer/Publisher/Photo, v2 betas.

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In the notes for Designer 2 Beta 1736 it states:  "When your bucket is loaded with a colour/fill you can now just click on any object to fill it even if it is not selected.  In this case this will just fill the whole object - if you want the fill tool to take into account intersecting shapes and curves they all need to be pre-selected as before."  Unless I don't understand, it looks as though clicking on the portion one wishes to fill with the loaded vector flood fill tool makes the selection on the layers panel.  Very nice, if this is the expected result.  Video attached.

 

 

 

 


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I prefer not to have unrealistic expectations based on new features. However, the ability to manipulate fills in vectors like this one makes me feel ecstatic and reminds me of my childhood. I am already envisioning the endless possibilities that we can achieve using this feature alone!

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16 hours ago, jmwellborn said:

In the notes for Designer 2 Beta 1736 it states:  "When your bucket is loaded with a colour/fill you can now just click on any object to fill it even if it is not selected.  In this case this will just fill the whole object - if you want the fill tool to take into account intersecting shapes and curves they all need to be pre-selected as before."  Unless I don't understand, it looks as though clicking on the portion one wishes to fill with the loaded vector flood fill tool makes the selection on the layers panel.  Very nice, if this is the expected result.  Video attached.

This is a (welcome) side-effect in some ways.  The new objects you created to do the internal fills are like any other curve object.  So, the 'click to select and fill' method works on them in exactly the same way.  When you click it will find the top most filled object at the mouse position - in this case it happens to be an area fill you made previously.

 

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Of course this is all work in progress. The new option "fill to visible boundaries" looks great (in fill preview)! But the results are a little bit unexpected to me.

In the following example i would expect to get only one completely new shape filled with red. Instead i get two additional seperate shapes and one of the original rectangles is also filled with red. It's a mix of fill and create ?

I guess the end result after filling should look like this - only one new compound shape on top (some kind of automatic "welding", boolean add):

image.png.6ca5c77f24c37c479891f88c97086a9a.png

 

EDIT

Ok, I think I now know what is confusing me here. What is the intended purpose of the vector flood fill tool ?

1) A quick and easy way to fill overlapping existing shapes with color in one shot. This may also be done with the existing workflows including style pipette. You still have to make some kind of more or less detailled selections before apply a fill 😏

2) Create new shapes to fill line drawings with colored areas. This may be heavily used by illustrators, architects, engineers etc. to complement areas of black and white line drawings with areas of color emphasis. To me this seems to be the real benefit (such a timesaver) 😍

At the moment it is not entirely clear to me in which direction the tool will evolve?

 

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Software: Affinity v1 - Designer/Publisher/Photo (1.10.6.1665), Affinity v2 (universal license) - Designer/Publisher/Photo, v2 betas.

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Filling with a color leaves a faint black outline on underlying shapes on iPad, at least.  In the example, the ring is on top of the planet and I filled in the lower portion with the color of the planet using the Fill Inside option.   You can see the faint outline. Neither the ring and the created shape have stroke set. 
 

this happens even if I embiggen the filled in shape so it completely covers the donut shape. It’s like the clipping boundary of the filled in shape is smaller than the bounds of the donut.  
 

edit: I was able to recreate this on the desktop. Darker colors on lighter backgrounds are more evident, that is an orange ring over a red planet doesn’t show as much or at all.   I could make the effect go away by messing with the coverage map, but I don’t see that function on the iPad app  

Screenshot 2023-04-01 at 8.27.27 AM.png

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54 minutes ago, Benfischer said:

Filling with a color leaves a faint black outline on underlying shapes on iPad, at least.

I see a faint outline in your screenshot, but it isn’t black, it’s red; i.e. the same as the fill colour of the donut.

For your particular example, I would either overlap the component shapes (see below) or use a clipped duplicate to achieve the desired result.

F30F24EC-EE8B-4E40-9B0C-455141A07F5E.thumb.jpeg.b39e0e2c8e077633c85dfe8b098c3aad.jpeg

Alfred spacer.png
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Hi @Benfischer, this is an anti-aliasing issue which can be seen by by turning anti-aliasing off...

In terms different of ways to approach the graphic itself you could either use the Vector Flood fill tool instead which is perhaps more appropriate here or after applying the Vector Flood fiil select the newly filled orange section together with the red ring and use the Subtract Boolean to remove the hidden section of red ring to remove it, which is in effect what the Shape Builder tool is doing...

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53 minutes ago, Benfischer said:

I  am using the vector flood fill tool. The coverage map option is not present on the iPad. Thanks

You can achieve the same thing by changing anti-aliasing to Force off, set via the blend range option for the selected layer and the underlying layer(s) which is accessed by tapping More in Layer options on iPad, though as per my earlier post, I'd use the Shape Builder tool...

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58 minutes ago, Hangman said:

You can achieve the same thing by changing anti-aliasing to Force off, set via the blend range option for the selected layer and the underlying layer(s) which is accessed by tapping More in Layer options on iPad, though as per my earlier post, I'd use the Shape Builder tool...

That does work, thanks. I had tried Force On but not force Off. Regarding the Shape Builder, that’s a fine solution, but I’m not actually trying to draw a planet, I’m just reporting a bug in the Vector Fill operation with this example. 

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3 minutes ago, Benfischer said:

Regarding the Shape Builder, that’s a fine solution, but I’m not actually trying to draw a planet, I’m just reporting a bug in the Vector Fill operation with this example. 

The problem you showed is not a bug. It's a limitation of Affinity's rendering of vector shapes, common to many apps, but not a bug.

My Shape Builder video involving your planet design shows a method of avoiding your problem in general, not just a method to build a specific ringed planet.

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