Efficient way to combine elements

[PixelSnader]

I spent the past two hours reducing a logo from a billion separate elements to three (white, light, dark) for vinyl printing.

 

But this shouldn't take as much effort as it did. I couldn't find a simple way to 'flatten' this image, so I had to manually add/subtract/divide many elements many times.

The outermost line and white background are not a problem, simply select everything and add. But the darkest shade is made up entirely of outlines of shapes such as the fries. So I cannot simply add those together as it will create one big clump. I also can't just make them all outlines and transparent centers because you'd see the underlying layers.

 

So for each fry i had to:

-expand stroke

-copy the inside

-copy the shape and make transparent (so you only have the stroke)

-subtract the stroke from the inside.

-subtract the result from the original shape

-subtract all the higher layers from the original shape

 

Does anyone know a decent workflow for this type of work in Affinity Designer?

 

I also reckon this is something that can be done algorithmically. At least in the sense that we should be able to divide the visual end result in contiguous blobs of one color. That means the dark green would be 1 element, and the white and light green about two dozen islands each. I'd still have to manually group those into one element but it'd already be much closer to what the endresult would be.

[MEB]

Hi PixelSnader,
Currently there's no easy way to flatten vector art as you discovered. This was already discussed earlier and i believe is already logged as an improvement but that's all i can say for now.
We still have to review/improve the expand stroke command and boolean operations code which are related so it may still take some time.

[R C-R]

8 hours ago, PixelSnader said:

Does anyone know a decent workflow for this type of work in Affinity Designer?

I wish I did!

 

I run into this sort of thing frequently with a lot of free vector artwork available online & elsewhere. I suspect much of it is made from auto-traced raster art using algorithms too 'dumb' to recognize that several shapes are conceptually all part of the same object, part of which is under other objects.

 

I am not sure there is a simple algorithm 'smart' enough to do that.

[Oval]

9 hours ago, PixelSnader said:

a decent workflow for this type of work in Affinity Designer?

 

Perhaps in two years. Hopefully expand stroke will be more usable sooner.

 

two workarounds: use a better print software respectively office / export a huge TIFF, auto trace TIFF