Warp Group improvements

[ThatMikeGuy]

The Warp Group feature in Affinity Designer is very powerful and is an advancement over Illustrator's clunky panoply of warping methods and it can be further exploited as a differentiator. The best part is the non-destructive nature and the way that more things can be added to the same warp after the fact. I love that live FX like Gaussian Blur can be warped along with the shape and I'm just starting to discover how powerful that is.

One problem is that several things are not supported by the warping. The biggest one lacking is Gradients. An object with a Gradient fill or line is not warped along with the object shape. It would open up many possibilities if the warp could be applied to gradients too. I don't think that bitmap objects are affected by the Warp either. Are there other things that are immune to warping?

Another idea that I would love to see is the ability to assign color values to the node points on a mesh. This could be a very interesting and useful way to customize vector objects with complex shading. It would essentially match and surpass Illustrator's Gradient Mesh tool by being much more flexible and powerful. 

[fde101]

19 hours ago, ThatMikeGuy said:

I don't think that bitmap objects are affected by the Warp either.

Image layers have their boundaries distorted but the pixel data within them stays locked in place.  Pixel layers ignore the distortions entirely.  Bitmap fills also ignore the distortions.  None of these behaviors are ideal in most cases, though it is nice having them as an option as there may be times when they are useful (just not as the only or even default option).

[EricP]

As a workaround, you can use Affinity Photo live Mesh Warp filter. It will distort the gradient fill, enclosing shape or both depending where you place it in the layers stack

[ThatMikeGuy]

2 hours ago, EricP said:

As a workaround, you can use Affinity Photo live Mesh Warp filter. It will distort the gradient fill, enclosing shape or both depending where you place it in the layers stack

Thanks. I don't use Photo as much, at least for this kind of thing. This only underscores then how it should/could be improved in Designer. Why not make it work the same in both apps?

[fde101]

16 hours ago, EricP said:

As a workaround, you can use Affinity Photo live Mesh Warp filter.

This actually helps to underscore what is probably the reason that those distortions don't happen with the warp groups in Designer.

The live mesh warp filter always produces raster results.

With the warp groups in Designer you can Convert to Curves, which means the end results can be exported and remain vector in nature - something that can't be universally done with gradients and bitmaps.

[sfriedberg]

If Designer had more powerful blend groups (thinking of CorelDRAW style blends which interpolate both shape and color between arbitrary vector shapes, to any desired number of intermediate steps), you could get the effect of warping a gradient by drawing a few overlapped shapes of distinct color and blending between "adjacent" shapes.  If you want to tweak the warp, just delete the blend groups (leaving the original shapes), and edit the shapes so their outlines better define the desired warp, then put the blend groups back on.

I don't know how Vector VonDoom has the patience to do his vector-based shading without an industrial strength blend tool.