Affinity Designer - Merging two gradients

[ilmiont]

Hey all,

 

New around here, owned AD for around three weeks, new to professional vector design. So far, it's been great, but now I've hit an issue and can't think how to solve it.

 

I'm drawing a flat vector design of a bird, where the body goes from black to grey and the head goes from black to white. The body is one union of shapes and the head is another.

 

I need the two gradients to merge, so that there's no obvious divide on the bird's "neck" where the shapes have their shared edge.

 

I.e., the two gradients should seamlessly merge, and appear to form from the same black area, but then be able to diverge, so the body is grey and the head is white.

 

Any advice appreciated.

 

ilmiont

 

(edit - added a very simplistic example of the problem, I need to get the two objects to merge convincingly)

Edited November 24, 2017 by ilmiont
added a very simplistic example of the problem

[ilmiont]

Never mind, I think I figured it out after walking away from it for a  bit.

 

Seems Layer -> Duplicate and the Transparency Tool are all I need

[Aammppaa]

If you want two objects to share the same smooth gradient…

• Select both objects
• Apply gradient to both simultaneously

[Aammppaa]

Alternatively…

 

Group the two objects, then apply the gradient.

 

Or…

 

Add the 2 shapes to make a single object, then apply the gradient.

 

Or…

 

Create a Compound Object from the 2 shapes, then apply gradient.

[Fixx]

I think OP needs to merge two different gradients so that gradients blend around the area the two objects meet. I am not sure it AD tools are sophisticated enough for that. In Illustrator you would use Gradient Mesh I guess.

[ilmiont]

1 hour ago, Fixx said:

I think OP needs to merge two different gradients so that gradients blend around the area the two objects meet. I am not sure it AD tools are sophisticated enough for that. In Illustrator you would use Gradient Mesh I guess.

Ye, as I wrote above, I've ended up using transparency on a duplicate layer to do what I want.

Imagine you have a 2D bird in flight in two unions, body/wings and neck/head.

I need a black radial gradient starting at the body and ending in grey at the wing tips, but white at the head.

To appear realistic, both the grey/white areas have to appear to be on the same path from the black area of the body. So really, I need a hypothetical V-shaped gradient path, with black, white and grey stops, where black is shared.

I've achieved the effect I want by applying the black-grey gradient to the body and the black-white gradient to the head (black slightly adjusted on the head to be closer match to the colour of the gradient body pixels near the join between the shapes.)

Then I duplicated the layer, joined both shapes and applied the black-grey gradient across the entire thing. Then a careful transparency curve allows the white on the lower layer to show through, while preserving the smooth gradient on the neck.

On mobile now, but tomorrow I'll add examples to illustrate. Struggling to describe the effect! Important point is, there are two objects, which need to have a gradient that makes them look like one object, but their end stops have different colours.