Applying tones to shapes

[jackamus]

This question is directed at the moderators. Do any of the moderators  and developers remember 'Zipatone' or 'Benday' Before these complimented 'Leteraset' They were A4 size sheets of very thin film that had all manner of line and dot tones that could be applied to illustrations.

If there are then please respond and I'll explain why.

[AffinityMakesMeWonder]

BerlinFX.

[DWright]

I remember these form my childhood along with cartoon character transfer sheets that you used with an existing drawing  

[jackamus]

Childhood! LOL that dates me!

My suggestion is that it would be a useful feature to add to AD if there was a way to add these kind of tones to shapes. In my case I am referring to technical drawings where hatching and cross-hatching or dots can be added to fill a shape rather than a continuous tone as is currently available. I imagine another 'Tone filling Tab' where you gave control of the size of the lines, thickness, angle and frequency. The same would apply to dots except there would also be a variable 'Pitch' distance between the dots.

Can you understand what I am explaining or do you want to see an example?

[Old Bruce]

2 hours ago, jackamus said:

This question is directed at the moderators. Do any of the moderators  and developers remember 'Zipatone' or 'Benday' Before these complimented 'Leteraset' They were A4 size sheets of very thin film that had all manner of line and dot tones that could be applied to illustrations.

I had to use something like you're describing. They came in different "Lines per Inch", off the top of my head I recall 85, 100, 200 and 300. Then they were further divided into Percentages of 10% to 90%. Used a lot of 85 lines per inch 30% and 50%. We printed on extremely cheap newsprint.

We used them to simulate grey tones in ads or editorial copy. We only used the dots, don't recall seeing the lines or circles in the shop, probably too 'niche' for our newspaper.

[firstdefence]

So basically halftone styles on a sheet.

[Old Bruce]

2 minutes ago, jackamus said:

My suggestion is that it would be a useful feature to add to AD if there was a way to add these kind of tones to shapes. In my case I am referring to technical drawings where hatching and cross-hatching or dots can be added to fill a shape rather than a continuous tone as is currently available.

There is (if you have Photo that is) the Halftone filter layer.

[iconoclast]

I experimented a lot with this Letraset stuff in my early days at the school of arts (about thirtyfive years ago) and I liked it. Because of that I created some Assets for Designer using GIMP some time ago. Different Halftones in steps of 10%. GIMPs old Halftone filter was very good for such things. Unfortunately the new one isn't. Some time ago StuartRC uploaded such assets here in the Ressources forum. Halftones in DC-Comic-Style (hope it's the right link). Maybe they are what you are looking for. And if you search the web for it, you will probably also find Halftone Brushes (Pixel Brushes) for Photoshop, that work in Affinity Photo too.

Possibly it is better to create such Assets with Designer as vectors, because the dots of small sized lighter sheets are not really spheres, but pixelated, if you use bitmaps for it.

[debraspicher]

Clip Studio does this in the form of tone/screen layers and they export really well to PNG. Since it was originally geared towards comic creation, it's actually built from the ground to support clean line art, well-rendered screen tones. I remember what @iconoclast is referring to with old school GIMP. It was great for classic Oekaki-style tones, etc. Pixel-based/8-bit dithering also comes to mind.

aPhoto does have pattern layers that will allow for using seamless graphics and I don't see why anyone couldn't just mask those in and out with a brush to complete the same task. Working on it as a whole layer makes the most sense to simulate the full sheet versus simply applying styles to the section.

[firstdefence]

3 hours ago, iconoclast said:

And if you search the web for it, you will probably also find Halftone Brushes (Pixel Brushes) for Photoshop, that work in Affinity Photo too.

 

I have a selection of Ron Deviney Brushes and in particular some nice engraver brushes but the cherry on top are these:  Zipatone 1974.zip Zipatone swatches.

[firstdefence]

And also as Assets: Zipatone.afassets

[thomaso]

6 hours ago, jackamus said:

I imagine another 'Tone filling Tab' where you gave control of the size of the lines, thickness, angle and frequency. The same would apply to dots except there would also be a variable 'Pitch' distance between the dots.

Don't the V2 features "Move Data Entry" + "Quick Grid" or the "Bitmap Fill" / "Vector Flood Fill" do what you want to achieve?

If you don't need seamless size variations then @StuartRc's patterns might also meet your needs.

[jackamus]

6 hours ago, thomaso said:

Don't the V2 features "Move Data Entry" + "Quick Grid" or the "Bitmap Fill" / "Vector Flood Fill" do what you want to achieve?

If you don't need seamless size variations then @StuartRc's patterns might also meet your needs.

I'm not sure how I would use bitmap tones in a vector drawing. I imagined the tones to be vectors.

[jackamus]

13 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

I had to use something like you're describing. They came in different "Lines per Inch", off the top of my head I recall 85, 100, 200 and 300. Then they were further divided into Percentages of 10% to 90%. Used a lot of 85 lines per inch 30% and 50%. We printed on extremely cheap newsprint.

We used them to simulate grey tones in ads or editorial copy. We only used the dots, don't recall seeing the lines or circles in the shop, probably too 'niche' for our newspaper.

That's exactly what I was referring to. It would be great if AD could offer a vector feature like those.

[jackamus]

13 hours ago, firstdefence said:

So basically halftone styles on a sheet.

That's correct but I deliberately didn't use 'Halftone' as I thought users might not know what I meant.

[jackamus]

13 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

There is (if you have Photo that is) the Halftone filter layer.

I don't use AP much and I wouldn't want to swap between AD for drawing and AP for applying tones.

[jackamus]

13 hours ago, iconoclast said:

I experimented a lot with this Letraset stuff in my early days at the school of arts (about thirtyfive years ago) and I liked it. Because of that I created some Assets for Designer using GIMP some time ago. Different Halftones in steps of 10%. GIMPs old Halftone filter was very good for such things. Unfortunately the new one isn't. Some time ago StuartRC uploaded such assets here in the Ressources forum. Halftones in DC-Comic-Style (hope it's the right link). Maybe they are what you are looking for. And if you search the web for it, you will probably also find Halftone Brushes (Pixel Brushes) for Photoshop, that work in Affinity Photo too.

Possibly it is better to create such Assets with Designer as vectors, because the dots of small sized lighter sheets are not really spheres, but pixelated, if you use bitmaps for it.

Yes I agree that a vector based feature would be better than a bitmap.

[iconoclast]

51 minutes ago, jackamus said:

I'm not sure how I would use bitmap tones in a vector drawing. I imagined the tones to be vectors.

You can also load bitmaps in Designer. E.G. the most vector brushes are in fact pixel images aligned to a vector. For your needs you could e.G. load a Bitmap with a halftone texture into  a vector shape, using the Fill tool. There is an option for it in the context bar of the Fill tool, in the menu "Type". After that you can adjust the size, aspect ratio and angle of the texture with the Fill tool. You can even save your settings as a "Style".

But you can also simply drag a Bitmap onto a open Designer document and nest it to a vector shape.

[iconoclast]

6 minutes ago, jackamus said:

Yes I agree that a vector based feature would be better than a bitmap.

It would at least create higher quality Halftone textures. But if you use big sheets of vector Halftones, it will need much more power than bitmap halftones. And if you use small sheets, you will have to puzzle a lot. For pixel halftone patterns you can create endless patterns in AfPhoto. Both have  Pros and Cons.

[GarryP]

Is this a request for a ‘cut-down’ version of seamless vector patterns?

For example: 
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/185511-affinity-designer-seamless-tiles-suggestion-alternative/
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/91955-seamless-vector-pattern-tool-with-tiling-options/
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/103217-feature-request-pattern-toolmaker/
etc. etc.

[iconoclast]

To demonstrate how you can easily create even big Halftone sheets, I puzzled a small vector shape that is attached to this post. It contains all you need for a 95% Halftone raster. Only drag it to your document and place it where you want. Then duplicate it this way:

1. Fist select the shape

2. Press "Enter" and the "Move/Duplicate" dialog will appear on screen.

3. Look at the "Transform" panel for the size of the shape and fill in the width  of it first into the "Horizontal" field of the "Move/Duplicate" panel. Attention! - in case of the 95% tile, I added an overlap of 0,5 pixels on each side to prevent seams. So subtract 1 pixel from the value you enter. You don't need such overlaps for rasters with positive dots (under 50%).

4. Enter the amount of duplicates you need to cover the space you want to fill with halftones. You can do this by simply clicking into the "Duplicates" field and then use the Arrow keys Up and Down.Then press "OK".

5. Create a Group outoff the first line of Dots you have now.

6. Do the same steps with the height.

You can scale the raster afterwards. Should be no problem, because it's vector data, that can be scaled lossless. I wouldn't do it before duplicating, because of the overlap, in this case. I hope it works good for you too. You can add it to your "Assets". It will not need a lot of space. When I have time, I will possibly create more tiles of the percentages from 90% to 5%. But that will probably take a little time.

95%(0,5pixelOverlapEach Side).afdesign

[jackamus]

This sounds a bit complicated!

I think my original posting has been over-reacted to!

I have attached a file showing a cross section of a box with crudely drawn hatching. I'm looking for a very simple way to do this as an extra feature in AD.

AD2.afdesign

[thomaso]

21 minutes ago, jackamus said:

I have attached a file showing a cross section of a box with crudely drawn hatching. I'm looking for a very simple way to do this as an extra feature in AD.

I assume you would like to adjust each parameter of such a structure seamless + flexible with a few sliders, for instance the line thickness, distance, angle in your example / or for dots the radius, distance, angle … and other shapes may be wanted, too … and gradients … and shape blends … – The possible pool of editable options could make it different from being "a very simple way to do this".

Again, because we can achieve such a look "in a very simple way" with bitmap fills, I am curious why you need or prefer vector for that fill patterns? The pattern itself would not get used for laser cutting, different from their parent shapes possibly, right?

By the way, your sample reminded me immediately to the few fills in the ancient Kid Pix app (with filling sound!).

[iconoclast]

40 minutes ago, jackamus said:

This sounds a bit complicated!

I think my original posting has been over-reacted to!

I have attached a file showing a cross section of a box with crudely drawn hatching. I'm looking for a very simple way to do this as an extra feature in AD.

AD2.afdesign 84.36 kB · 0 downloads

"Complicated"? Really? Only 6 steps that take about one or two minutes.

This hatching thing you want to do is very easy. Only draw on line. Then hold Ctrl (on Windows) or probably Cmd on Mac and drag the line as far as you like. Then release the mouse button and simply press Ctrl/Cmd + J again and again (Power Duplicate) and you will get such a hatching. Finally you can save the whole thing as an Asset, if you want to use it again later.

[jackamus]

I can't get your instruction to work! I drew a line at 45º now what do you mean 'drag as far as you like'? Are you talking about it's length or the distance of the area to be covered?