Stars in a Circle

[czechman86]

Hello,

 

I am looking to put stars in a circle and was wondering if there was an easy to do this. I have done it manually in the past, but that often creates uneven and unprofessional looking results. I want to do something like the Betsy Ross, which I have attached below for reference (in case anyone is unfamiliar with this flag).

 

Thank you for your help!

 

 

[GarryP]

Welcome to the forum czechman86.

You can achieve what you want fairly easily.

* First decide on the number of stars that you want, then divide 360 by this number. This gives you a rotation value in degrees that you will need later.
* Now create a new document.
* Draw your first star using the Star tool.
* Align the star to the middle of the page horizontally but put it higher than the middle vertically. The idea is to use the middle of the page as a rotation point.
* Move the rotation point of the star to the middle of the page.
* Duplicate the star (CTRL+J) and rotate the duplicate by the number of degrees you calculated earlier.
* Then start duplicating the last duplicate star (CTRL+J).

Designer will automatically realise that want to do the same thing again and it will eventually create a ring of stars as you keep duplicating.

You might need to do this a few times to get the correct ratio between star size and ring size but it's not very time consuming to play around with.

I hope this was what you wanted.

[czechman86]

That worked beautifully! Thank you for the assistance and the welcome!

[Alfred]

Just a quick note to point out that Mac users need to use Cmd+J (⌘J) instead of Ctrl+J.

[GarryP]

Glad to help czechman86.

Thanks for pointing that out Alfred.

[PixelPest]

I´d say for the sake of "editability" use glyph with the artistic text tool on a circle path:

 

Cheers

P.

[GarryP]

A nice alternative solution PixelPest but I guess it might be difficult to get the spacing between the stars just right.
For example, on your left-hand sample, the gap between the stars at top-centre is slightly bigger then the gaps between the other stars.
Hardly a catastrophe, but for perfectionists - or people with exacting (or just plain picky) clients - it might be a bit of an issue.
A technique that's well worth remembering all the same.

[PixelPest]

I find it´s perfectly controllable via Character-tab and Kerning/Tracking/Baseline etc.  :D

 

Cheers

P.

[Bento]

Had to do this for a european company brand. My way to do it was to create a circle and a star and use power duplicate :

 

[GarryP]

Bento, I'm not a huge fan of that solution as you end up having a lot of extra circles (if I've interpreted what you're doing correctly). That would not only give Affinity more work to do drawing unnecessary objects (granted, not a huge overhead in this case) but they could - under certain circumstances, "interfere" with each other, E.g. if the blend mode was anything other than Normal.

I'm not saying that your way is the wrong way to do it, just that it's not really an optimum solution and it could cause other issues that might be difficult to track down later on. It does no harm for people to know about lots of different ways to do things.

If you know that you need a certain number of stars of a certain size and they're not going to change much then my solution is pretty straightforward.
On the other hand, if you want to keep things fluid and experiment with different numbers and shapes then PixelPest's solution is good - but you might need to tinker with various settings to get things just right (and you are limited to the glyphs in whatever font you're using).

An alternative would be to use symbols but that goes a bit beyond the scope of the original question.

[Bento]

Bento, I'm not a huge fan of that solution as you end up having a lot of extra circles (if I've interpreted what you're doing correctly). That would not only give Affinity more work to do drawing unnecessary objects (granted, not a huge overhead in this case) but they could - under certain circumstances, "interfere" with each other, E.g. if the blend mode was anything other than Normal.

 

I'm not saying that your way is the wrong way to do it, just that it's not really an optimum solution and it could cause other issues that might be difficult to track down later on. It does no harm for people to know about lots of different ways to do things.

 

If you know that you need a certain number of stars of a certain size and they're not going to change much then my solution is pretty straightforward.

On the other hand, if you want to keep things fluid and experiment with different numbers and shapes then PixelPest's solution is good - but you might need to tinker with various settings to get things just right (and you are limited to the glyphs in whatever font you're using).

 

An alternative would be to use symbols but that goes a bit beyond the scope of the original question.

 

Right, it might not be the cleanest way for sure, but the quickest depending on your needs. (Gif is real time creation beside creating the circle and star.)

 

PixelPest's solution is pretty cool too, but you can't modify the shape of your star as you wish so for me it's no go.

 

Your solution is interesting, but seems to me a bit of a waste of time to create a new document/place the star and move the rotation point.

 

But all of that is a question of habits. The ones i find useful for me might surely not meet your needs !

 

;) Cheers !

[R C-R]

Just as an aside, the power duplicate method should be a lot easier to do in the 1.6 versions, which (hooray!) now support using the rotation center in the Transform panel. So you just need to set that in the workspace for the first star, duplicate once, & enter the rotation value in the Transform panel for the duplicate. This means you can enter formulas like 360/13 (for 13 stars) directly in the rotate field, without having to do any math or worry about rounding errors for manually entered values.

[uncle808us]

Had to do this for a european company brand. My way to do it was to create a circle and a star and use power duplicate :

 

I can't understand how you are doing this are you using Photo? If so how are you doing this?

[GarryP]

Bento, the more possible solutions the better so I'm glad you gave yours. I'm certainly not saying the one I gave is the best. The user can choose which one they prefer or is easier for them. (Creating the new document wasn't an integral part of the workflow, it was just a quick place to start and a blank page is easy to align to. You can do the whole thing without the new document or aligning anything.)

R C-R, that's good news. Kudos to the developers.

uncle808us, all of this is on Designer. Maybe someone - like me, probably - should have mentioned this earlier.

[uncle808us]

Just as an aside, the power duplicate method should be a lot easier to do in the 1.6 versions, which (hooray!) now support using the rotation center in the Transform panel. So you just need to set that in the workspace for the first star, duplicate once, & enter the rotation value in the Transform panel for the duplicate. This means you can enter formulas like 360/13 (for 13 stars) directly in the rotate field, without having to do any math or worry about rounding errors for manually entered values.

How or rather where do you set the rotation value for duplicate?

[SunRiseMoon]

* Align the star to the middle of the page horizontally but put it higher than the middle vertically. The idea is to use the middle of the page as a rotation point.

* Move the rotation point of the star to the middle of the page.

Hey,

deutsch/englisch (Google translator :))

Weiß irgendjemand, warum man alle möglichen Werte außer dem Rotationsmittelpunkt in Koordianten mittels der Tastatur eingeben kann?

 

Does anyone know why you can enter all possible values ​​besides the rotation center point in the coordinate by means of the keyboard?

 

Thanks.

[R C-R]

How or rather where do you set the rotation value for duplicate?

In the "R" field in the Transform panel. In the 1.6 beta version, if an object's rotation center is visible in the workspace, the fields in the Transform panel use that as a reference for field values instead of one of the 9 anchor points that otherwise would be used. Clicking on any of the anchor points in the Transform panel automatically hides the rotation center in the workspace & uses that anchor point instead.

 

The implementation is quite clever, requiring no extra buttons or anything else to set.

[R C-R]

uncle808us, all of this is on Designer. Maybe someone - like me, probably - should have mentioned this earlier.

Power duplicate works the same way in Affinity Photo as in Affinity Designer, as does showing & moving an object's rotation center (even if it is a pixel layer).

[Alfred]

Power duplicate works the same way in Affinity Photo as in Affinity Designer, as does showing & moving an object's rotation center (even if it is a pixel layer).

 

As indicated earlier, the Rotation field in the Transform panel in the 1.5 versions doesn't use the rotation centre in the workspace. To work around this, place the first star at the required distance directly above the centre of the document, draw a straight line (with the Pen Tool in Line Mode) between the centre of the star and the centre of the document, group the line and the star and then click on the bottom centre point of the alignment control in the Transform panel. Duplicating this group, setting the rotation of the duplicate to 360/13° and then power duplicating will give you 13 stars spaced equally around the circle. If desired, you can finish by ungrouping everything and deleting the lines, although this isn't strictly necessarily if those lines have no stroke and/or no stroke colour.

[R C-R]

As indicated earlier, the Rotation field in the Transform panel in the 1.5 versions doesn't use the rotation centre in the workspace.

Thankfully, in both the Photo & Designer 1.6 betas you can use the rotation center in the Transform panel, so once the final versions are released we won't have to resort to workarounds for this in either app.