Blends? Contours?

[AuthorAuthor]

I'm sorry if this was already submitted—I did some scrolling and no joy :(

 

Can we have Blends and Contours? Dynamic ones that can be tuned after creating, like CorelDRAW can?

 

I didn't grow up on a mesh fill and have idiosyncratically used Blends very well in photorealistic illustrations.

 

 

TIA,

 

Gary

[MEB]

Hi Gary,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

There's already a Replicate/Blend tool in Designer's roadmap. I don't know much details about it yet but assuming it will work as everything else in Designer you should be able to edit it and see the results in real-time. There's no ETA available.

There will be a contour/offset tool at some point too.

[retrograde]

Yes there are none of these tools yet Gary. Hopefully soon.

 

Currently though you can do a LOT with linear and radial gradients. Combined with the transparency tool and gaussian blurs, your shading needs are pretty much met. It's a different workflow but just as flexible, probably even more so.

 

Re the contours, or in illustrator parlance, offset paths, nothing yet.

 

Nice clown btw.

[AuthorAuthor]

Yes there are none of these tools yet Gary. Hopefully soon.

 

Currently though you can do a LOT with linear and radial gradients. Combined with the transparency tool and gaussian blurs, your shading needs are pretty much met. It's a different workflow but just as flexible, probably even more so.

 

Re the contours, or in illustrator parlance, offset paths, nothing yet.

 

Nice clown btw.

Thank you! I'm retrograde, too, only not in name!

 

Yes, I use "feathering" and overlay gradients combined with gradient transparencies in Xara all the time.

 

One in a while you need a contour, though, might we agree? I'ts very hard to outline, or create an Oxford rule for DTP without Contouring, although I guess you could convert a stroke to a path and adjust the outline width several times, eh?

 

Thanks for all the great help, everyone. I'm sorry I'm not on the board as often as I'd like to. I get book-writing gigs only about once a year, so it's feast time in an otherwise feast or famine financial year right now!

 

My Best,

 

Gary

[evtonic3]

I believe that Affinity has a better tool for contours and blending for this down the line, not like AI's. I think it's going to be super and interactive, kind of like Corel's extrude with its live handles and wire frame previews. I predict something like this but in live preview.

[AuthorAuthor]

I believe that Affinity has a better tool for contours and blending for this down the line, not like AI's. I think it's going to be super and interactive, kind of like Corel's extrude with its live handles and wire frame previews. I predict something like this but in live preview.

 

Thanks for that, evtonic3. It's my conviction that an object should have contro handles of some sort or another the oment a selected object is chosen that has editable attributes of that tool. Working in a proxy box sucks. A very old book from Microsoft on UI design had a mantra I like: Do not make something appear onscreen that interrputs a (creative) process.

 

That's one of many reasons I cannot work in Illustrator for more than 2 mintues before migrating my project to somewhere friendlier!

 

It's odd how Creature House built Expression with a lot of Illustrator's interface paradigms, but managed to escape the proxy box crap.

 

My Best,

 

Gary