Pencil, Pen and Node Tool improvements

[Frozen Death Knight]

8 minutes ago, Return said:

I'm on windows too but still why you want to hold the Alt key while using the pencil tool?
AFAIK it has no function.

Because shift+alt allows you to create straight lines without forcing strict snapping for angles. This bug makes it impossible to close a shape while drawing freeform straight lines that aren't just specific angles.

[Return]

Ah but you didn't mention the shift key for straight lines here.
I see what your saying but I rather use the pentool for straight lines
And yes this doesn't have the same autoclose like the penciltool but double clicking the startnode will close the shape too.

 

 

[Hangman]

17 minutes ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

Because shift+alt allows you to create straight lines without forcing strict snapping for angles. This bug makes it impossible to close a shape while drawing freeform straight lines that aren't just specific angles.

Why would you want a straight line to be a closed shape?

[Frozen Death Knight]

4 minutes ago, Return said:

Ah but you didn't mention the shift key for straight lines here.
I see what your saying but I rather use the pentool for straight lines
And yes this doesn't have the same autoclose like the penciltool but double clicking the startnode will close the shape too.

 

 

Actually I did.

Well, good for you. That however is not my concern, since I do in fact use this feature without angle snapping. Fixing this has no impact on your workflow.

[Return]

25 minutes ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

When I manually added a fill colour the button started working again. I would consider this a bug, since it seems to affect new shapes with no designated fill colour upon its creation.

Seems logical as you have set the fill to none.
When using this on, say shapes, it will always use the last used attributes and if fill is set to none there it would also reflect in any newly created shapes.
This has always been the case and sometimes annoys me as well.

[Hangman]

44 minutes ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

Shift+alt still forces the colour picker to get activated

Unless you start dragging your stroke while holding Shift and then add the Alt key after you start dragging...

[Frozen Death Knight]

3 minutes ago, Hangman said:

Why would you want a straight line to be a closed shape?

For silhouette paintings where snapping is not needed all the time to create a specific shape. The Pencil Tool is supposed to be more freeform than the Pen Tool, so having freeform angled straight lines makes perfect sense wouldn't you agree?

[Frozen Death Knight]

5 minutes ago, Hangman said:

Unless you start dragging your stroke while holding Shift and then add the Alt key after you start dragging...

Yes, my point exactly. Shift+alt should just allow you to draw straight lines without angled snapping from the beginning, but the colour picker activates instead. Alt baseline already allows you to colour pick, so it doesn't make sense for it to be on shift+alt as well and override the functionality of disabling angled snapping for straight lines. It is a UX problem where you have to walk around the problem to get to the functionality you want.

[Return]

11 minutes ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

Well, good for you. That however is not my concern, since I do in fact use this feature without angle snapping. Fixing this has no impact on your workflow.

Glad to see you still have that friendly attitude towards others that try to be helpful.
 

[Frozen Death Knight]

8 minutes ago, Return said:

Glad to see you still have that friendly attitude towards others that try to be helpful.
But perhaps you should try an other option to have more control over your issues

I was being very polite towards you in this case. Your comment was not helpful in the slightest, however. This is a specific piece of feedback on fixing the issue I'm having for the devs. You already said that this doesn't affect you personally, so what else is there left for you to add?

[Hangman]

11 minutes ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

For silhouette paintings where snapping is not needed all the time to create a specific shape. The Pencil Tool is supposed to be more freeform than the Pen Tool, so having freeform angled straight lines makes perfect sense wouldn't you agree?

I would agree but asking the question again, why would a straight line need to be closed…

If the line’s not perfectly straight then you wouldn’t need the Shift key and so the shape would then close…

Maybe I’m not fully understanding what it is you’re doing so apologies if that’s the case… Maybe a quick screen recording would be helpful…

[Return]

1 minute ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

so what else is there left for you to add?

In all politeness, good for you.
But at least I know to get it working with the pencil tool and it is now up to you to find out.
So good luck with that.👋

[Frozen Death Knight]

8 hours ago, Hangman said:

I would agree but asking the question again, why would a straight line need to be closed…

If the line’s not perfectly straight then you wouldn’t need the Shift key and so the shape would then close…

Maybe I’m not fully understanding what it is you’re doing so apologies if that’s the case… Maybe a quick screen recording would be helpful…

Silhouettes need to be closed shapes and for doing further manual editing of the curve it creates afterwards, whether it is sculpting it with Sculpt Mode or using the Node Tool. It is also an inconsistency where Auto-close just stops working when pressing a single modifier key that affects a very specific type of line. I could understand if it maybe only did so when pressing alt on its own, but it is affecting every modifier key when pressed in combination such as shift+alt.

It just seems like an odd choice to have straight lines close except for in these specific cases. I think it just makes sense to make Auto-close just work based on which setting you have in the top toolbar and it reduces additional clicks for fixing the issue manually.

It's all right!

[blureogroup]

On 10/21/2024 at 6:49 PM, Patrick Connor said:

By design, further smoothing is no longer possible once the curve is deselected.

Why? Is it really by design or have you not found a way to implement it being available for every path yet?

This should really be available for all paths all the time. It is miles ahead of the smoothen path button.

[Frozen Death Knight]

9 hours ago, Return said:

In all politeness, good for you.
But at least I know to get it working with the pencil tool and it is now up to you to find out.
So good luck with that.👋

You are making assumptions that I somehow did not know about those methods while being condescending about it when I declined. I explained my issue yet you keep insisting on "helping" me when that is not the purpose of this discussion. I was reporting a UX issue/bug and that's it. I will not be discussing this further.

[Patrick Connor]

2 minutes ago, blureogroup said:

Why? Is it really by design or have you not found a way to implement it being available for every path yet?

Because we do not choose to permanently save the device input data. The tool does keep the current input points until it's been smoothed but only the resultant curves are stored in the file, not the hundreds/thousands of input coordinates.

In some respects you could have "non-destructive" curves as a feature but saving all that data just in case you want to change it using the source data (rather than the node tool) isn't part of Affinity's approach to data storage.

[blureogroup]

25 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

Because we do not choose to permanently save the device input data. The tool does keep the current input points until it's been smoothed but only the resultant curves are stored in the file, not the hundreds/thousands of input coordinates.

In some respects you could have "non-destructive" curves as a feature but saving all that data just in case you want to change it using the source data (rather than the node tool) isn't part of Affinity's approach to data storage.

Glad to know you’re taking keeping the program lean so seriously!

I agree that this is a separate feature request and I will leave a suggestion in the requests thread.

[Hangman]

10 hours ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

Yes, my point exactly. Shift+alt should just allow you to draw straight lines without angled snapping from the beginning, but the colour picker activates instead.

This still works if you use the Pencil Tool. You Hold the Shift Key start dragging your line and then Add the Alt Key to the mix. You can then draw non-restricted straight lines at any angle.

[Frozen Death Knight]

43 minutes ago, Hangman said:

This still works if you use the Pencil Tool. You Hold the Shift Key start dragging your line and then Add the Alt Key to the mix. You can then draw non-restricted straight lines at any angle.

Yes, but it is an annoyance nonetheless. I just want to start drawing immediately with shift+alt. Colour picking does not need to activate for shift+alt when alt based colour picking already exists. It is wasting a keyboard shortcut with duplicated functionality for no good reason at all and it causes issues with shortcuts overriding each other. Just remove colour picking from shift+alt and I'll be satisfied.

[Hangman]

4 minutes ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

Just remove colour picking from shift+alt and I'll be satisfied.

That makes sense, I can't see any practical reason for it being there in the first place...

[Juhani]

I agree with @Frozen Death Knight. Shift+Alt should give us the ability to draw unrestrained straights immediately with the Pencil tool, not initiate the color picker.

Right now I can still do that when I carefully first hold Shift, then start drawing, and only then add Alt. If I then release the Shift key I can continue drawing normally (without straight lines) and hitting Shift+Alt I can again return to drawing with straights. I think this can be very useful. However, if I now want to close the shape with one final straight, Alt key will disable the auto close function as already noted. I tried to overcome this by letting go of Alt while keeping the cursor still, but then the program jumps my last achor point to some random place, presumably to force the last straight to be at 45º angle.

For example, in the demo below I'm trying to draw a shape for an ice cream with a cone. In the first attempt I release the mouse while holding the Shift+Alt to get the straight where I want it, which prevents the auto close function to kick in. In the second attempt I'm releasing Alt before releasing the mouse, which does initiate auto close but the program jumps my last anchor point to some random spot.

[Return]

It is key to release the right keys when needed.
Drag+Shift+Alt = non restricted straight lines.
Release temp the Shift key while still holding Alt =restricted  straight lines.
Release temp the Alt key will invoke the autoclose.
And yes it adds a random node point ,this can be considered a bug.
But it can be autoclosed with the pencil tool none the less.

[EmT]

@Frozen Death Knight
It is by design that holding Alt will stop Auto-Close from working, after drawing your curve if you release Shift + Alt before releasing the mouse button, Auto Close will trigger. 

13 hours ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

When I manually added a fill colour the button started working again. I would consider this a bug, since it seems to affect new shapes with no designated fill colour upon its creation.

The button works in conjunction with the Fill set in the Colour panel or on the context toolbar when using the Pen tool. If you have no fill set then it will correctly not set a fill and the Use Fill button will be unchecked.
However there is a known issue where the Use Stroke and Use Fill buttons can get out of sync with the Colour or Stroke panels. 

[Frozen Death Knight]

26 minutes ago, EmT said:

@Frozen Death Knight
It is by design that holding Alt will stop Auto-Close from working, after drawing your curve if you release Shift + Alt before releasing the mouse button, Auto Close will trigger. 

The button works in conjunction with the Fill set in the Colour panel or on the context toolbar when using the Pen tool. If you have no fill set then it will correctly not set a fill and the Use Fill button will be unchecked.
However there is a known issue where the Use Stroke and Use Fill buttons can get out of sync with the Colour or Stroke panels. 

Can't disabling of Auto-close just be set to just alt without shift+alt getting affected as well? It would give the desired effect without interfering with straight lines with snapping angles disabled. You can still disable Auto-close by just holding alt after making the desired line if that's what you want to do. The current setup feels too limiting and inconsistent.

Plus, shouldn't pressing alt also enable Auto-close when the top bar setting has it off as well? It would make it more consistent with top bar settings for other Affinity tools that allow for custom settings of modifier behaviour.

Yeah, that was what I observed as well. Good to know that it is a known issue, since I managed to get very inconsistent behaviour when testing it.

[Junior Jap]

Hi, @Patrick Connor

I'd like to suggest shortcut keys system for circling the nodes sytle (sharp, smooth, smart) rather than using double-click. For instance, when nodes tool active and the desired nodes selected, we can hit a key to turn them into the node style we desire. It's way more efficient than double clicking the nodes and by using the shortcut key system we can modified multiple nodes at the same time, which double-clicking can't achieve. Double-click seems not efficient and can leads to move the nodes (minor move) as well, especially when using pen on tablet or display tablet.

I'd also suggest to add one more node style to the current style available which is "symmetry node". This symmetry nodes will have two equal length of handles on it. When one handle modified or pulled, the other handle will automatically follow the lenght of the one got modified, both handles will maintained in the same length, achieving symmetry or equal curve on the section .

The other feature I'd like to have in this update is adding node handles on the "sharp" node style so we can modify the curve by pulling the handles without pulling the curve first to make the handles appear. I hope it will make sense.

Thank you,