Contour around multiple vector contours

[Der Peter]

Hello, I am new to the Affinity universe. I am not very familiar with graphic design and usually used Inkscape to do some basic stuff. Now I have a problem and thought, maybe Affinity Designer can solve that. I want to make a wardrobe for our kids and have multiple vector graphics placed on a wider document. To carve it with my CNC I need a line around all of the contours, but all ways I tried do not give the expected result, but increase all contours which are selected. Can you point me to a solution? I am not sure, if it is possible in general, because the program needs to detect an outer line for all placed objects. 

The wardrobe is only for personal use. 

 

Thank you in advance!

Best regards
Peter

 

 

 

wardrobe.afdesign

Edited August 24 by Der Peter

[GarryP]

Welcome to the forums @Der Peter

This recent thread might be of some use:

 

[Der Peter]

Thank you very much! It is not the exact thing I wanted, but I guess I can handle it with that thread by drawing some temporary lines in the duplicated path. Thank you for pointing me to the correct thread, I was searching for hours (not only for Affinity Designer).

[firstdefence]

In part, it's because the strokes are expanded so they are the shapes, when you try to contour the vectors it will contour both sides, also, dividing will not work, nor will fill holes. you literally need to delete the internal curves. There are also a few places where the curve is gapped, see image below.

You need to do a bit of curve breaking and adding at the points around the gapping.

A few points here, I've broken the paths up to their individual characters, so I'll use Jungle book characters to demonstrate

Made a short video.

 

 

[firstdefence]

On some of the character's simply fill holes will work, I just selected the awkward one lol

[Der Peter]

Wow, thank you very much for going into deep with my problem! Yes, I will try to fill the gaps and also build up connections between the single object paths. I guess this will be necessary to get a complete outer shape. I thought, that there are maybe some automatisms for this kind of problem. 

[thomaso]

8 minutes ago, Der Peter said:

I thought, that there are maybe some automatisms for this kind of problem. 

Isn't "Fill holes" a kind of automatism that searches itself for relevant nodes + handles them as expected?

For closing open curves an automatism may not be desirable because it would not know which nodes to merge and which to ignore. Just try with a few different open curves what you achieve by applying the automatism "Close Curve".

  –> 

[Der Peter]

I don't mean any open curves, maybe they need to be fixed before. But as you can see in the file or the video of firstdefence, I have several (hopefully) closed but separated paths which shall be carved into wood. To make it look nice, I want to cut an outline around all of them together - not on every single one. But if I duplicate them all and delete some node, it might work with the described method.

[thomaso]

36 minutes ago, Der Peter said:

I don't mean any open curves,

Yes, you may rather want "Join nodes" for closed curves. Depending on the desired contour distance + the gap width it may work without manual node editing, for instance: