How to erase lines that are behind other shapes?

[Jan Thomä]

I have the two stars on the left and I would like to get the result on  the right (same strokes visible but the whole thing is transparent). In this particular case, I used the shape subtract function to subtract the frontmost star from the star in the back and then pasted another star in and made everything transparent. This sort of works, but in my actual case i have about 30 shapes drawn on top of each other and this is not really a feasible workflow. I also fiddled around with the "erase" blending mode but this doesn't properly export to SVG, so I cannot use this either. Is there some way to achieve this result without manually editing each involved shape?

[Ron P.]

I may not be understanding everything that you're wanting to do. So my video depicts what I think that you're trying to accomplish, and how I would go about it.

Select all the shapes, go to the color pallet, select no fill.

[Ron P.]

Never mind, I see you're not wanting the overlapping strokes.. 😕

[Jan Thomä]

Yes, I want the inner strokes not to be visible. 

[Paul Mudditt]

I almost cracked it using the shapebuilder tool on Ron's filled shapes, then removed the fill. Just needed to take more care on the bottom section.

[Jan Thomä]

One particularly nasty example would be this (a bunch of sticks). These are currently not transparent. 

 

[Paul Mudditt]

19 minutes ago, Jan Thomä said:

One particularly nasty example would be this (a bunch of sticks). These are currently not transparent. 

 

 

Quick and dirty way is to use Affinity Photo and erase white paper. Since you want it as a vector then you would need to trace it pass it into a software with autotrace.

 

 

 

 

Edited December 29, 2023 by Paul Mudditt
Updated

[v_kyr]

Reusing/grabbing Paul's above shown APh screenshots and throwing them through a vectorizer/tracer (in my case VectorMagic as that supports making BG's transparent on it's own after tracing), will give the following curves vector representations then ...

• sticks.pdf
• sticks.svg

• stars.pdf
• stars.svg

[Paul Mudditt]

34 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Reusing/grabbing Paul's above shown APh screenshots and throwing them through a vectorizer/tracer (in my case VectorMagic as that supports making BG's transparent on it's own after tracing), will give the following curves vector representations then ...

• sticks.pdf
• sticks.svg

• stars.pdf
• stars.svg

Wow, very impressed with vector magic, just installed on iPad and it gives the best vector conversion I have seen to date !

[NotMyFault]

Using Designer, the following process gives a correct vector result only using Affinity apps. Some steps could be automated in Photo after the expand stroke step.

1. assuming you have curves with black stroke and white fill. If using a vector shape, convert to curves.
2. have all relevant layers e.g. in one group to keep it organized. Expand group
3. expand stroke on all curves. This will seperate black strokes from white fills. In my example the bottom layer is fill, above the stroke.
4. forget / delete lowest white (fill) layer.
5. subtract second fill from 1st stroke
6. merge 2 lowest strokes.
7. repeat process at step 5 until all layers consumed.

 

[Paul Mudditt]

3 minutes ago, NotMyFault said:

Using Designer, the following process gives a correct vector result only using Affinity apps. Some steps could be automated in Photo after the expand stroke step.

1. assuming you have curves with black stroke and white fill. If using a vector shape, convert to curves.
2. have all relevant layers e.g. in one group to keep it organized. Expand group
3. expand stroke on all curves. This will seperate black strokes from white fills. In my example the bottom layer is fill, above the stroke.
4. forget / delete lowest white (fill) layer.
5. subtract second fill from 1st stroke
6. merge 2 lowest strokes.
7. repeat process at step 5 until all layers consumed.

 

Very nice indeed ! Did it export to SVG ok?

[NotMyFault]

10 minutes ago, Paul Mudditt said:

Very nice indeed ! Did it export to SVG ok?

Yes, see attached files (screenshot of exported svg opened in Designer, original file before export)
I added a blend range on the group initially, this must be removed to avoid rasterization.

 

hiding below as vector.afdesign

[Jan Thomä]

@NotMyFault, that worked really nicely even for my sticks! Thanks a lot! Also thank you very much @Paul Mudditt, @v_kyr and @Ron P. for your suggestions. It's always good to have options!