Mr Dangle Dangles Posted January 14, 2015 Share Posted January 14, 2015 Hello,Ive been using Affinity Designer for a few weeks now, great piece of software but what I'm finding is that to do some simple tasks can be very long winded.For example, when drawing polygons/triangles mostly with the pen tool It would be great to be able to snap the anchor points/nodes to each other and also to group them together then snap them to a centre point and reposition them as 1... If you know what I mean? I'm finding that they don't also want to snap to lines unless they're on the horizontal or vertical plane of another point.Ive been playing with the snap tools, but no luck.Also another timesaving thing for example, if I draw a circle/polygon and divide it into segmented parts again with the pen tool, is there the ability to make and split those segments into separate shapes?I might be missing something somewhere, any help would be much appreciated.Many Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff MEB Posted January 14, 2015 Staff Share Posted January 14, 2015 Hi Mr Dangle Dangles, Welcome to Affinity Forums. 1) Regarding snapping to nodes, check the snapping buttons on the Snap section of the context toolbar for the Node and Pen Tools. The first button lets you snap to nodes of selected objects (so for example, if you want to snap to a node on another object you must have both selected); the second button will snap the handles (for example in a segment composed by a straight line followed by a curve, you can make the handle of the curve align with the straight line); finally the third button lets you snap more than one node at once. 2) It's not possible to snap to lines in the current version. This should be added later. 3) You cannot perform boolean operations between lines and shapes yet. But if you close the path (draw a rectangle from it for example) that divide the circle/polygon you can then select both and go to Layer -> Geometry -> Divide to split it in parts. Quote A Guide to Learning Affinity Software Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr Dangle Dangles Posted January 15, 2015 Author Share Posted January 15, 2015 Thanks MEB, you have confirmed my findings! Another question... Is there a way, after joining / snapping nodes together to convert them into a single node for movement?It would be great (for me) to be able to select a number of end nodes and to align them together as one. ;) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff MEB Posted January 15, 2015 Staff Share Posted January 15, 2015 I'm not sure i understood you question.. You can select and move more than one node at once. Just press Shift while in the Node Tool and click on each node you want to move. Then drag them all as you would normally do. If what you want to do is to "merge" two overlapping end nodes from two different paths (lines) into one (so it becomes a single line) do the following: with the Node tool selected, drag the end nodes you want to merge so they overlap each other, go to the Action section in the context toolbar and press Join Curves (fourth icon). Quote A Guide to Learning Affinity Software Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr Dangle Dangles Posted January 16, 2015 Author Share Posted January 16, 2015 For example... On the 1st image, when I've merged the points of the triangles, how do I make the points move as 1 single point?The 2nd image is what I've just done using Affinity and it would be a lot quicker if I could snap points to a single and then move them as one.Also if you can see on the 2nd image, in-between all the snapped shapes, the lines have a faint gap showing the background. Short of having a stroke of the same colour on all of the individual shapes, is there a way around this also? (Edit - wrong picture.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr Dangle Dangles Posted January 16, 2015 Author Share Posted January 16, 2015 Here's a close up grab of the gap between anchored lines... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff MEB Posted January 16, 2015 Staff Share Posted January 16, 2015 Ah ok. Now i understand what you're trying to achieve. 1 - To move the overlapped nodes (the center node(s) on you first image), select all the triangles, change to the Node tool and drag it around that center node to select all overlapping nodes. Then click and drag them all at the same time. If you want them to snap to a node on another shape, don't forget to select that shape too. 2 - Those seams shouldn't be visible in the exported image, but it may happen. To overcome this you can: - add strokes with the same color as the fill as you already discovered; or - add a background shape covering the same area as the whole figure with a similar average color; or - export your work at a bigger size (4x or more) and downsample it again to the original intended size. Mr Dangle Dangles 1 Quote A Guide to Learning Affinity Software Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr Dangle Dangles Posted January 16, 2015 Author Share Posted January 16, 2015 Node movement sorted! Thanks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr Dangle Dangles Posted January 16, 2015 Author Share Posted January 16, 2015 Also just sorted the seams out, by copying and pasting the final layer on top before export. Lines are clean and colour blocks solid with no seam. Thanks again.But a tool to snap nodes to other nodes would be great as doing it by hand, they seem to want to snap to other guides before the selected node, unless I zoom right in. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff MEB Posted January 16, 2015 Staff Share Posted January 16, 2015 But a tool to snap nodes to other nodes would be great as doing it by hand, they seem to want to snap to other guides before the selected node, unless I zoom right in. It may look like it's complicated, but i think this is in part explained by the nature of your project. It has a huge number of triangles, some very small an close together, each one with three nodes. So there's always a lot of nodes to where you can snap and as such you really have to zoom in a little to get more control over the snapping. This is perfectly normal given that this is a project that requires great precision to align all the triangulation going on. In a regular illustration project this situation is not so obvious. Quote A Guide to Learning Affinity Software Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tazintosh Posted January 25, 2016 Share Posted January 25, 2016 Hi folks, I was going to open my own topic, but I think this one perfectly fits the need. What's already working: • snap a node from shape A to a node of Shape B Here's a feature request: • snap a node from shape A to a curve of Shape B • snap a node from shape A to another node of shape A (Edit: this is working by selecting the "snap to selected curves" on the node tool context menu) • snap a node from shape A to a curve of shape A On the following video, the first 10s are showing what's working today; starting second 11, it's about the missing snapping features. AffinityNodesAndCurvesSnapping.mov As always, thanks for your support! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff MEB Posted January 25, 2016 Staff Share Posted January 25, 2016 Hi Tazintosh, We are aware of these limitations. Ben is working on improvements to the Snapping that should cover that and a few more use cases. Quote A Guide to Learning Affinity Software Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff Ben Posted January 25, 2016 Staff Share Posted January 25, 2016 Yes. All these limitations are known, and improvement will come in the future. As ever, I stress that features are weighed on how well they perform in practice. Snapping to curve for a single point is fine (except for the fact that precision is an issue with sub-division of beziers), but I also need to consider how multi snap to multi snap performs - and it's usually exponentially bad. So, before I release an improvement, I need to come up with a nicely scaling solution, or a way of intelligently restricting expensive snapping so that usability doesn't suffer. Quote SerifLabs team - Affinity Developer Software engineer - Photographer - Guitarist - Philosopher iMac 27" Retina 5K (Late 2015), 4.0GHz i7, AMD Radeon R9 M395 MacBook (Early 2015), 1.3GHz Core M, Intel HD 5300 iPad Pro 10.5", 256GB Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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