Vector Flood Fill

[debraspicher]

2 hours ago, albertkinng said:

You were very brave trying to do that with live text! I don’t even think that’s possible. The way I always do it is converting the text in curves first then make the cuts and colors. It would be amazing if you can do that with editable text! 

For me this was always the hint I was heavily Illustrator-trained. The fear of being caught in a 1-way workflow, ie unmanaged. "Everything must be curves!" "This option wasn't available because you haven't done X" "Did you make a copy of that layer first?"

Also, that's the sign of a good tester. Oh I shouldn't typically do that? Let's do that first and see what happens.

[loukash]

2 hours ago, albertkinng said:

It would be amazing if you can do that with editable text! 

Just insert a large contiguous shape(s) inside the live text, i.e. clip the shape with the live text. Then you can edit the text as you see fit.

[albertkinng]

1 hour ago, loukash said:

insert a large contiguous shape(s) inside the live text

I know you understand what I was saying. 

[loukash]

1 minute ago, albertkinng said:

I know you understand what I was saying. 

And vice versa: 

1 hour ago, loukash said:

what the flood fill tool does here is essentially just converting text to curves on the fly and then boolean dividing it based on the other selected curves

In other other words, there is no "magic" involved. It's "only" a very clever application of already existing features that's making the workflow instant. But it has likely the same technical limitations as if you would perform all these steps manually one by one.

[loukash]

34 minutes ago, albertkinng said:

I can't recall if this has been done before

Illustrator's Paint Bucket tool?

[GRAFKOM]

I found a bug in this tool regarding using with text.

If a word is selected and you click with the Vector Flood Fill Tool in the area between the letters, the text frame of that word will be colored. This operation cannot be undone with CTRL Z and also does not appear in the History panel.

If someone uses Designer, he can't do anything with this word anymore, you can only open this file in Publisher and there you can remove the fill color of the frame from the Text Frame panel.

 

[debraspicher]

29 minutes ago, GRAFKOM said:

I found a bug in this tool regarding using with text.

If a word is selected and you click with the Vector Flood Fill Tool in the area between the letters, the text frame of that word will be colored. This operation cannot be undone with CTRL Z and also does not appear in the History panel.

If someone uses Designer, he can't do anything with this word anymore, you can only open this file in Publisher and there you can remove the fill color of the frame from the Text Frame panel.

 

Strange-ish behavior with Live Text. Not sure if it is intended. Weirdly adding a curve nearby makes it work a bit better, but by itself.. can only fill once. And I guess it's filling the bounding box (of sorts). Kinda useful if one needs a text background? (Also undo works fine for me)

Edit: Added gifs

[GRAFKOM]

I don't know why, but after restarting the program I can undo the operation of giving the text frame fill color with this tool, I can later change it to a different color, but it is impossible to remove this fill later.

Unless you go to Publisher.

I work on Windows.

 

 

[R C-R]

47 minutes ago, GRAFKOM said:

If a word is selected and you click with the Vector Flood Fill Tool in the area between the letters, the text frame of that word will be colored.

On my Mac, it behaves slightly differently -- I have to click directly on one of the characters for this to happen. If I click anywhere in the space between characters, nothing happens.

Also, CMD -Z to undo & going back via the History panel works.

But it is still a bug that the Art Text frame should not be filled....

[debraspicher]

7 minutes ago, R C-R said:

On my Mac, it behaves slightly differently -- I have to click directly on one of the characters for this to happen. If I click anywhere in the space between characters, nothing happens.

Also, CMD -Z to undo & going back via the History panel works.

But it is still a bug that the Art Text frame should not be filled....

Same.

[jmwellborn]

@GRAFKOM, @R C-R, @debraspicher   Hi Everybody.  It may be a bug, or intended behaviour. Not sure which.  But here is how you get around it.  Highlight both text and curve layer on the Layers Panel. 

 

 

 

[debraspicher]

Another thing I noticed. If we hit '/' to try to "disable" the swatch (to test for transparency in this case), it switches to 50% grey instead. I guess that's not intentional.

[R C-R]

53 minutes ago, debraspicher said:

Another thing I noticed. If we hit '/' to try to "disable" the swatch (to test for transparency in this case), it switches to 50% grey instead.

Is "/" supposed to "disable" the swatch, whatever that means? I can't find anything about using that key to do anything, although it does change the current color to 50% grey.

[jmwellborn]

There are all sorts of things one can and cannot do!  Apologies to @StuartRc for a terrible misuse of his beautiful Inktober 2020 02 Fish Palette for this.  You can add as many curve layers as you want to break your effect into smaller bits.  Each time you add a curve layer, though, it seems that you have to drag that layer down to position just above the background text layer.  Then highlight those two layers  and flood fill again.  

You can use the added raster perspective and mesh warp live filters (in Designer).  You can also use the V2 Warp features (although I decided to spare everybody anything there!).  And you can, of course, paint with anything, using the new drag/drop bitmap fill to colour and swatch panel.  

"Oh, the Places You'll Go!"  Dr. Seuss. 

[debraspicher]

I see that the Vector flood fill works with global swatches. This alone is wonderful and important for color managing a document. This already speeds up my workflow substantially since I'm not going for geometry to make new fills.

Another bonus, because this SVG I'm working with in particular has tones included. I needed only general clicks to get the fills I intended to fill those up. Maybe this use-case was already thought of by Serif, but for texture artists & comic people, this is invaluable.

Note: It would be nice to be able to hold Shift while selecting areas to fill to try to get these gaps filled in a bit quicker (with the same selected color obviously). Between the hitching on my PC before it's highlighted (more below about that) and after the fill, it does extend the time to color the graphic substantially.

It's possible to see the "timelineness" of each fill in this gif, but I also attached a video. This is because I'm waiting for PC to register a new selection to create the fill. A few seconds at least. PC fans are revving up and in HWinfo, I can see that CPU is being pegged.

Other thoughts: I wonder if it's worth making it possible when hovering over a Layer, if we could continue testing colors on the same fills we'd just created. Essentially a recolor option.

For example: I filled the petals in the above example. This created the individual paths as expected. In order to experiment with color swatches, I had to keep re-selecting the individual fills in Layers panel I made afterwards in order to adjust them. Thankfully, it's only a flower, so it was only so much to select.

Now, that may not be the purpose of the tool, but I can see it feeling clunky for some as it may be what they expect, so something to consider. I can still just select the fills individually of course in Layers panel and changed fills this way if they were the same color and this would've been fine for me. So in my case, it's not a "must add". It just may need some kind of UX/feedback so that users are aware this tool is for creating moulds, not a click adventure with crayons.

Only suggestion I might make is when additional fills are created, they go above the previous paths (somehow), not below. Because otherwise, the user has no idea other fills are being created without ever looking at the Layers panel. It just feels as if the tool missed.

The Vector Flood fill does seem to have a unresponsive hit box at points (*But I think this is due to the issue I cite below with the delay). Fills seem more responsive to the tool than Strokes. Might be anecdotal. Might just be the tendency for Stroke gaps to be tinier. I did manage to crash the app trying to trigger the state where I could fill at one point.

I'll attach video here with system monitoring:

Uhh. I was editing my post in the background and this appeared:

[Sean P]

On 2/18/2023 at 4:36 PM, GRAFKOM said:

I found a bug in this tool regarding using with text.

If a word is selected and you click with the Vector Flood Fill Tool in the area between the letters, the text frame of that word will be colored. This operation cannot be undone with CTRL Z and also does not appear in the History panel.

If someone uses Designer, he can't do anything with this word anymore, you can only open this file in Publisher and there you can remove the fill color of the frame from the Text Frame panel.

 

Thanks for the report. 

I've reproduced and logged this with development. Interestingly a single click fills the text frame and is undo-able. However a click and drag throughout the frame, fills it the same, but this time is not undo-able.

[Sean P]

16 hours ago, debraspicher said:

The Vector Flood fill does seem to have a unresponsive hit box at points (*But I think this is due to the issue I cite below with the delay). Fills seem more responsive to the tool than Strokes. Might be anecdotal. Might just be the tendency for Stroke gaps to be tinier. I did manage to crash the app trying to trigger the state where I could fill at one point.
 

Uhh. I was editing my post in the background and this appeared:

Hi debraspicher - Are you able to attach a copy of the document you were filling (prior to it being filled) please? It looks like there may be a lot of nodes in it, which is causing the slow down and lag. The message you've shown about it timing out, indicates this may be the case.

If you could attach the file we can have a play around with it and see if improvements can be made!

[loukash]

2 hours ago, Sean P said:

I've reproduced and logged this with development. Interestingly a single click fills the text frame and is undo-able. However a click and drag throughout the frame, fills it the same, but this time is not undo-able.

It would be nice if it would be fixed but not fully removed. It could be a useful option for those who don't want or can't make the roundtrip to APu's Text Frame panel to add a text frame fill.

[GRAFKOM]

12 minutes ago, loukash said:

It would be nice if it would be fixed but not fully removed. It could be a useful option for those who don't want or can't make the roundtrip to APu's Text Frame panel to add a text frame fill.

Maybe it's just easier to add a Text Frame to the Designer Panel?

[debraspicher]

1 hour ago, Sean P said:

Hi debraspicher - Are you able to attach a copy of the document you were filling (prior to it being filled) please? It looks like there may be a lot of nodes in it, which is causing the slow down and lag. The message you've shown about it timing out, indicates this may be the case.

If you could attach the file we can have a play around with it and see if improvements can be made!

Sure. This was as an SVG. I have other examples possibly, but I need an upload link.

[Sean P]

On 2/17/2023 at 10:28 AM, JhonatanS said:

Hi, I'll attach a video to show the result,

it doesn't seem to apply correctly, considering the colors of connected shapes.

But I see when the Shape is Empty it works nice,
but when having color actually the Color tolerance doesn't seem to be used.

Is a bug, or am I doing something wrong? 😅

 

Thanks for that video! I too am also getting this behaviour so just trying to find out whats going on - as I can't see any way to get it working.

[Sean P]

17 minutes ago, debraspicher said:

Sure. This was as an SVG. I have other examples possibly, but I need an upload link.

Here you go
https://www.dropbox.com/request/UE9ACrnGVQBSGWTQumDg

Thank you!

[lepr]

Filling an unfilled region of the source objects results in the generated shape being placed at the very bottom of the document or Artboard's layer stack instead of just below the lowest source object. Not sure that's an actual bug, but it seems wrong to me.

[Ash]

Hi All - new build is now available which includes various updates to the vector fill tool. More details in this post.

[StuartRc]

Thank you so much for this fantastic tool. Makes a brilliant paint brush as well (Curves and Groups!) Just been playing with the update. It is going to save so much time...! Used to spend a lot of time selecting groups of objects and recolouring....not anymore!😀