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Do we have to have a new layer appear with every line drawn ?


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Hi,

I am drawing an aircraft side view profile, or hoping to !...every small line I draw sees a new layer appear.

In Freehand I would have made a layer called panel lines , activated it so it receives everything I am drawing and all lines would have appeared on that layer, then I could select that layer and select all those lines in one quick option., alter their thicknes, group them perhaps, move them about en masse etc.

With AD I am getting hundreds of line layers, layer palette is going to be massive.

 

then what happens when I start drawing individual small details like cowl fasteners, screw heads etc !

 

Is there an easy way to draw equally spaced rivets as little rings ? Else I will have to use spots, again I presume some kind of brush pattern ?

In photoshop the brush spacing option will space out the spots that make up a stroke with the brush..

 

What is best practice here so as to not end up with thousands of layers ? ...and be able to select all panel lines on panel lines layer or wherever they end up in one go ?

 

Steve1

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Click on the 'Add Layer' icon at the bottom of the Layers panel. As long as that layer remains selected, any new object will be nested inside it, and the containing layer can be treated as a single object.

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Cheers,

 

any ideas on how to draw equally spaced rivets ? either spots or rings ?

 

CAD groans under the weight of repeated objects and uses instances, update the instance, all offspring also update, has drawbackas though .

 

How does AD handle such thousands of offspring or individually drawn spots or rings ?

 

Steve1

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any ideas on how to draw equally spaced rivets ? either spots or rings ?

 

Draw one rivet, keep it selected (or re-select it) and press Ctrl+J, or Cmd+J on a Mac, to duplicate it. Move the new rivet to the desired position and press the keyboard shortcut repeatedly until you have enough rivets in a row.

 

If you want a grid of rivets (or any other object!) you can create and select a row of them and then 'power duplicate' it as described above.

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Watch the power duplicate video

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw3E5Iujzyw

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The equivalent of instances in AD are called symbols. This video tutorial briefly shows how to use them. So for example, you could use a rivet symbol along with power duplicate to create rows of them. As an alternative, you could use the Arrange options to distribute a selection of rivet symbols on a horizontal or vertical line with a user adjustable spacing (by disabling Auto Distribute). By group them, you could duplicate the group, rotate it as needed & maybe skew it for a quasi-perspective effect.

 

You could also create one or more symbols from a group of rivet symbols or create other symbols that contain them, like maybe for riveted panels that repeat along a section of a fuselage.

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Looking at some aircraft drawings, I see what I suppose are rivets depicted as either dots of small open circles. Both of those might be done using dotted lines.

 

Chose the pen stool, set the stroke to what might be appropriate thickness, and draw a line, Default will give it rounded edges. Change the stroke to dotted, and give the dot size, the 1st entry box at the bottom, next to "DASH:" a very small value, .01 or less. Adjust the next number for the gap between. 1, for instance will give a continuous line of ever so slightly overlapping circles. Typically, these sorts of dots require minimal memory or storage.

 

They can be turned into open circles by using the expand stroke command. Then, make the fill "none" and the stroke a small fraction of the circle size. These will take more resources. I just did a row of 80 6 pt dots, and the saved doc was 9K. Converted, the dic was a bit above 90K.

 

I've done a few things this way using around 15000 dots of various sizes and colors. There was some lag, but the only time I've had a significant pause was trying a boolean union on 30000 dots.

 

Another thing which might work in some cases is to draw a line, change it to a text path, and use a dingbat or symbol font to "type" the row in. This works nicely because the character spacing can be more flexible than the dotted line.

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  • 1 year later...

Hi,

thanks for the replies, bit late here in getting back to you guys.

Quote

They can be turned into open circles by using the expand stroke command.

Q1. I have typed Expand stroke into the help search window and nothing is found, Where is this command ?

Q2. I have drawn the line, size 5mm for 5mm dia rivets, given it dash then first entry box 0.001 (this being the width of the seed that the dot is based on, so may as well make it minute, second box I entered 25 for 25mm spacing but it was huge, entered 5 and I have 25mm spacing, is not this box in mm ?

Its this versus the text path method. When I used macromedia Freehand we could create any symbol, select a path and then go add text to path and select a symbol we had drawn as the 'text' e.g draw a dog and have lots of dogs along a path, adjust leading, baseline shift, spacing, to get effect required. Get hold of end of text symbol and drag it along path to move the dogs along to wherever required.

 

Q2.5  To use a dingbat, if I find a perfect dot one, can I have it as a circle and adjust the circle thickness ? I need to do such when later on discover that scale circles are not visible on the end result and need enlarging or outline thickening up ! The whole advantage of vectors.

 

Q3. Can this be done in AD as this is what I need maybe for precise control aand keeping file size down, and if I alter the dog to say a spaniel from a red setter, would all paths with spaniel become red setters ?

 

Q4. Is text path method going to minimise file size versus the dash line method, it sounds as if it might.

 

Q5. Also can I draw the aircraft full size and thus I will need a paper size custom about 9.15 metres long and a few metres high ?

 

Q6. what is the advantage of having each item , each panel line, each road segment etc etc drawn become a separate layer ?

Cheers

Steve1

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15 minutes ago, Steve1 said:

Q1. I have typed Expand stroke into the help search window and nothing is found, Where is this command ?

Because you are referencing Photoshop I will assume you are using Affinity Photo. There is no Expand Stroke in Affinity Photo, Expand Stroke is in Affinity Designer and is under Layer > Expand Stroke. 

Q2. This may be set to show as points, there is the option to turn this off and have it show in whichever units you have the document set to This option is under Preferences > User Interface: Show lines as points, unchecking this option will allow Affinity Photo to show lines as the document units.

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A1. In your first post you mentioned "AD," which I assume means Affinity Designer. If so look in the AD Layer menu > Expand Stroke, about 3/4 of the way down that menu. 
A2. No, the boxes are not in mm or any other unit. They set the dash pattern using two number pairs. Refer to the Stroke panel help topic, About Dash Line Style section for more about how they work.
A2.5. No, as long as you are using text, the shape of each glyph is fixed.  Give me a minute to check something. I think there is a way to do this, depending on the glyph. For a font like Arial you might want to use the Glyph Browser set to show you geometric shapes. The white circle, black circle, or even dotted circle might work for your purposes.

Edited by R C-R

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3 minutes ago, R C-R said:

A2. No, the boxes are not in mm or any other unit. They set the dash pattern using two number pairs. Refer to the Stroke panel help topic, About Dash Line Style section for more about how they work.

I thought they were using em as a measurement, do you have any other info on Dashed Lines R C-R?

scrub the above, I get it now.

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Is there a reason why stroke and dashes info isn't in Affinity Photo help?  No wonder I couldn't find it, I notice you reference Affinity Designer help for that info!

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44 minutes ago, Steve1 said:

Q5. Also can I draw the aircraft full size and thus I will need a paper size custom about 9.15 metres long and a few metres high ?

Yes, in New document Affinity has Metres as a document unit

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18 minutes ago, R C-R said:

A2.5. No, as long as you are using text, the shape of each glyph is fixed.  Give me a minute to check something. I think there is a way to do this, depending on the glyph. For a font like Arial you might want to use the Glyph Browser set to show you geometric shapes. The white circle, black circle, or even dotted circle might work for your purposes.

Most Unicode fonts include a bullet character (U+2022) which is usually a perfect, or near perfect, circle.

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Quote

RC-R  If so look in the AD Layer menu > Expand Stroke, about 3/4 of the way down that menu. 

Sorry cant see that , any chance of a screen dump on how one access that menu and exactly where it is ?

Quote

Alfred Most Unicode fonts include a bullet character (U+2022) which is usually a perfect, or near perfect, circle.

can I though make it an outline only circle and adjust the stroke weight ?

Steve1

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5 minutes ago, αℓƒяє∂ said:

Most Unicode fonts include a bullet character (U+2022) which is usually a perfect, or near perfect, circle.

I was thinking more along the lines of circle glyphs like the two in the attached glyphs.afdesign file. For these, "black" is filled, & "white" is unfilled, so varying the stroke thickness of 'white' circles or stroke thickness & color & opacity of 'black' ones, there are lots of possible variations.

glyphs.afdesign

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8 minutes ago, Steve1 said:

Sorry cant see that , any chance of a screen dump on how one access that menu and exactly where it is ?

The Layer menu is at the top of the workspace, along with File, Edit, Text, etc.

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11 minutes ago, Steve1 said:

can I though make it an outline only circle and adjust the stroke weight ?

My apologies, Steve! I misread your question, perhaps having been slightly thrown off the scent by your reference to a “perfect dot” dingbat. I hope @R C-R‘s suggestions are closer to what you’re looking for.

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12 minutes ago, Steve1 said:

Sorry cant see that , any chance of a screen dump on how one access that menu and exactly where it is ?

821111441_Screenshot2018-08-22at22_21_27.png.8965e0c331591f8eabc09d30fedfe44d.png

It will be greyed out if you don't have a vector object selected.

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