Affinity Designer For beginners Too: Alt Clicking Add Button Causes Shape to Disappear

[thechexican]

I'm working my way through the Affinity Designer tutorial videos to familiarize myself with the program, and there's some inconsistent behavior between what happens in the app on my machine and in the video.

 

When alt-clicking the add button to create a compound shape, the video tutorial merges the shapes into a non-destructive compound shape. Yet, on my computer, doing so causes the top shape to disappear.

 

 

 

The strange part is, the top shape will reappear if the position of the tear drop is moved far away from the top shape:

 

 

or moved higher up into the top shape:

 

 

Additionally, even though both shapes have the stroke set to none, there's still a gap between the two shapes, which indicates that it's not possible for Affinity Designer to do a non-destructive compound addition properly:

 

 

It's very confusing to have the program behave so inconsistently when following an in-house tutorial video — is this (another) bug, or did I miss a step and not set an option/preference properly?

[thechexican]

Turns out, it was partial user error, partial software error - the pen tool in smart mode added some points at overlapping angles when I was clicking about trying to follow the video, and I'm not familiar enough with vector editing to have figured it out immediately. The cause for the issue only became apparent once I moved onto the next step in the video and tried to use the corner tool.

[PaulDean]

Hi, 

I ran into the same problem working through the tutorials.  Contacted the Forum and received the following answer:

 

Hi PaulDean,

Welcome to Affinity Forums  :)

This is due to a bug that prevents the boolean operation Add to work properly (already logged).

 

To "fix" your project do the following:

- select the shape on the top (the large one)

- change to the Node tool and drag a marquee around all nodes of the shape

- click on the Smooth button in the Convert section on the context toolbar

You can now perform the add operation as indicated in the tutorial, selecting both shapes and pressing and holding ⌥ (option/alt) while clicking on the add icon.

The result should be correct.

 

This 'fixed' the problem and I went on and completed most of the tutorials.  Hope it helps.

PaulDean, Ocala, FL

[Michael Sheaver]

I too ran into this problem following the tutorial while using version 1.5, and the smooth operation described by PaulDean did indeed fix this alt-add behavior. Thanks for posting this!