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Your example is using vanishing perspective. I'm not dealing with that (yet). Parallel perspective is nice in that I can manipulate everything with our standard transformations - scale, rotation and shear.

 

I'll see what I can do for vanishing perspective, but it is going to be trickier.  As I mentioned before, I want to avoid if possible the need for objects/layers to have any supplemental data that links them to a plane, or pseudo-3D position.  More on that later... when I've spent some hours thinking about it.

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@JET_Affinity

I'm interested to hear your ideas for tools supporting traditional axonometric drawing.  I try and write tools that satisfy use cases, rather than referencing existing software first - thinking outside the box.  So, inspiration from how you'd choose to work would help.

 

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No, I understand that this is a 2D program and that there cannot be rotation on multiple planes.

But lest anyone under-appreciate the significance of this feature, here's a simple example of what I'm talking about in the context of your billboard question:

BIllboard_1of3.PNG

BIllboard_2of3.PNG

BIllboard_3of3.PNG

So you see, such a feature set does indeed facilitate "rotation on multiple planes".

Although this is an entirely 2D construction method, and although there is no "live" rotation connection between the default isometric and the custom dimetric grid presets, it's still quite practical in terms of expedience and its result is just as geometrically correct as if it had been generated by a 3D CAE program. This is what I meant in saying that isometric and dimetric (and trimetric) methods can actually be used together in the same drawing. They are not separate, unrelated arbitrary conventions. The grids feature will help you do that.

And much more. The above is fairly trivial. Axonometric drawing is not just about drawing "boxy" objects, or using "clever tricks" to "project" flat designs onto a plane, like the ubiquitous mockup of a cereal box which is all many illustrators with little exposure to isometric drawing mistakenly think it's about. The axonometric grids will be just as useful for constructing mechanically-correct parallel perspective drawings of objects of any shape, and the opportunity it represents to commercial illustrators is significant.

JET

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Nice.

 

My "phase 2" for grids was going to focus on palettes of grids, and grid origins, for this very purpose.

 

Of course, virtual rulers/guides, adhering to the current grid plane will achieve a lot of this.  There is plenty more work to be done here, and carefully thought on how it will work alongside existing tools.

 

I also imagine that the key to defining complementary grids is to use some notion of a cube with Azimuth/Elevation control. I have some ideas for that. Maybe more on that later.

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These are very good things going on. Kudos, @Ben and the rest of the team!

 

While you’re at node tool, would it be possible to expand segment dragging functionality, so that there’s an option to keep nodes’ direction instead of having them rotated like it currently works? I know you can grab a single handle and constrain the editing direction by holding Shift, but editing curve flow by dragging a segment is often much more natural. For type design or modification it’s actually indispensable. Shift modifier seems to be available for segment dragging, doesn’t it? I miss this functionality very much and I think than anyone dealing with type or logo design would find this really useful.

 

Cheers,

Matt

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On 2/1/2018 at 8:36 AM, JET_Affinity said:

And much more. The above is fairly trivial. Axonometric drawing is not just about drawing "boxy" objects, or using "clever tricks" to "project" flat designs onto a plane, like the ubiquitous mockup of a cereal box which is all many illustrators with little exposure to isometric drawing mistakenly think it's about. The axonometric grids will be just as useful for constructing mechanically-correct parallel perspective drawings of objects of any shape, and the opportunity it represents to commercial illustrators is significant.

JET

 

Sorry for the late reply in your very detailed example. I didn't realize there was more activity since my last visit in this thread. Seeing your example and then reading that objects don't need to be in boxy regions, perhaps I interpreted the wrong message in Ben's video. I have to be honest though, I don't quite understand how it works and I don't understand all of the terminology in your post. This method is very new to me, but the example you gave is a good indication of what can be done. I'm sure there will be tutorials and help articles, but I'm having a hard time grasping this.

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Seeing your example and then reading that objects don't need to be in boxy regions, perhaps I interpreted the wrong message in Ben's video.

Your idea was not off-point. Ben's demo does apply to your example of positioning multiple separate images on a billboard that is already drawn in perspective (except that the perspective would be a parallel perspective, not a converging perspective with vanishing points, etc.). The salient point of the demo in that context is that you can not only effectively drag and drop those other images (be they rectangles or stars or whatever) onto the face of the billboard, but having done so, you can also freely rotate them while they are "projected" onto that surface just as easily as you would rotate them when drawn "flat on the page."

Quote

I have to be honest though, I don't quite understand how it works and I don't understand all of the terminology in your post.

Don't let the terminology dissuade you. One big misconception is that "isometric" drawing is just a trivial and limited way to draw "boxy" things. At the opposite extreme is another misconception that it is only appropriate to the engineering department for exploded parts catalogs, and that it is more difficult than it actually is.

The terms themselves explain a lot of it:

Isometric (same measure) drawing is just the most commonly used variant of axonometric (axis-measured) drawing. Its defining characteristic is that all three axes of the measuring system are equally foreshortened, so the same scale (same measure) can be used along all three directions.

Dimetric (two measures) orients the coordinate system in such a way that two of the axes are equally foreshortened. So two measuring scales are used (one ruler for the two equally-foreshortened axes, and another for the third one.)

Trimetric (three measures) orients the coordinate system in such a way that all three axes are foreshortened different amounts.

The key is that in all three cases, the three axes are not arbitrarily foreshortened; they are foreshortened in geometrically-correct proportion to each other. The grids feature takes care of that for you.

The system is actually just as venerable and rich a drawing discipline as "vanishing point" perspective, and just as widely applicable to commercial illustration projects (see my Jan 27 post). It's not trivial, but it's not difficult, either. And you don't have to have a mechanical drafting background to use it.

Quote

This method is very new to me, but the example you gave is a good indication of what can be done. I'm sure there will be tutorials and help articles, but I'm having a hard time grasping this.

A few examples already in the Affinity Designer marketing, videos, and Workbook make the point: They range from the mildly "technical" (the building floorplan video) to the completely whimsical (the colorful bird's-eye view fantasy artwork). The stuff Ben has given us a sneak peek at just adds some very useful and powerful automation to the process, which will make such things all the easier and quicker to accomplish.

JET

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4 minutes ago, JET_Affinity said:

The salient point of the demo in that context is that you can not only effectively drag and drop those other images (be they rectangles or stars or whatever) onto the face of the billboard, but having done so, you can also freely rotate them while they are "projected" onto that surface just as easily as you would rotate them when drawn "flat on the page."

 

I see.

 

 

Quote

 

Don't let the terminology dissuade you. One big misconception is that "isometric" drawing is just a trivial and limited way to draw "boxy" things. At the opposite extreme is another misconception that it is only appropriate to the engineering department for exploded parts catalogs, and that it is more difficult than it actually is.

The terms themselves explain a lot of it:

Isometric (same measure) drawing is just the most commonly used variant of axonometric (axis-measured) drawing. Its defining characteristic is that all three axes of the measuring system are equally foreshortened, so the same scale (same measure) can be used along all three directions.

Dimetric (two measures) orients the coordinate system in such a way that two of the axes are equally foreshortened. So two measuring scales are used (one ruler for the two equally-foreshortened axes, and another for the third one.)

Trimetric (three measures) orients the coordinate system in such a way that all three axes are foreshortened different amounts.

The key is that in all three cases, the three axes are not arbitrarily foreshortened; they are foreshortened in geometrically-correct proportion to each other. The grids feature takes care of that for you.

The system is actually just as venerable and rich a drawing discipline that "vanishing point" perspective, and just as widely applicable to commercial illustration projects (see my Jan 27 post). It's not trivial, but it's not difficult, either. And you don't have to have a mechanical drafting background to use it.


 

 

Thank you for explaining this.

 

Quote

A few examples already in the Affinity Designer marketing, videos, and Workbook make the point: They range from the mildly "technical" (the building floorplan video) to the completely whimsical (the colorful bird's-eye view fantasy artwork). The stuff Ben has given us a sneak peek at just adds some very useful and powerful automation to the process, which will make such things all the easier and quicker to accomplish.

 

Really? Oh I will have to check them out then.

The website is still a work in progress. The "Comics" and "Shop" sections are not yet ready. Feel free to connect with me and let me know what you like or what can be improved. You can contact me here, on my contact page, YouTube channel, or Twitter account. Thanks and have a great day!

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On 1/24/2018 at 5:03 AM, Ben said:

There is a fair amount of other stuff coming in 1.7 that I'm not going into in this thread - some of it not so obvious just from the UI. The tool refactoring work was big, but is opening the door to new features.  So, 1.7 should be a big push forward.

 

As we get closer to 1.7 Beta time, I'll be releasing more details.  As ever, we will only release complete features - anything not up to scratch will be held back until it is up to our exacting standards.

I'm curious, are we through retooling the code like it was talked about before 1.6 came out and therefore held up advancement in the software? I may have this wrong sorry if I do.

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On 31.01.2018 at 1:10 PM, Ben said:

I'm interested to hear your ideas for tools supporting traditional axonometric drawing.  I try and write tools that satisfy use cases, rather than referencing existing software first - thinking outside the box.  So, inspiration from how you'd choose to work would help.

Hi!

Is it possible in theory to snapping the bezier handles to shapes? 

Thanks!

 

snap2.png

wave.afdesign

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13 hours ago, telemax said:

Hi!

Is it possible in theory to snapping the bezier handles to shapes? 

Thanks!

 

It will be... subject to snapping options in the usual way.

 

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On 12/20/2017 at 11:39 PM, Ben said:

And, here a video showing the new rotate-on-plane feature of the Move tool.  A new shape is created into a grid, using the "Edit In Grid Plane" mode.  Then, with the mode on, any rotations maintain the grid plane perspective.

 

RotateOnPlane.mov

 

That feature looks really cool! Is this a new thing or something already existed in another program (you know what program i mean)? And how do you make a tilted plane? I never knew how to do that.

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On 1/31/2018 at 2:40 AM, Bri-Toon said:

No, I understand that this is a 2D program and that there cannot be rotation on multiple planes. That is understood. I did say different angled, but that wasn't the right word to use since the squares would actually be on the same angle. I will explain what I meant.

 

Billboard.thumb.png.3182e0b554b69822ec514042c13388db.png

 

Here is a very simplified example, but here is a giant square shape of a billboard. If the goal is to decorate it and add shapes inside for rotation, it wouldn't work in this case. So what I was saying is to have the giant square just serve as a placeholder, and add smaller squares inside that one for the rotation of the star shapes. The stars will rotate as long as they are in single shapes and can snap in place. Then just set the stroke of the smaller squares to none to give the impression that the stars are snapped to the larger square.

 

Can't you do this in a flat persepctive first and then use warp/distort tool (when it came out) to then make it not flat?

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On 2/2/2018 at 2:13 AM, matisso said:

These are very good things going on. Kudos, @Ben and the rest of the team!

 

While you’re at node tool, would it be possible to expand segment dragging functionality, so that there’s an option to keep nodes’ direction instead of having them rotated like it currently works? I know you can grab a single handle and constrain the editing direction by holding Shift, but editing curve flow by dragging a segment is often much more natural. For type design or modification it’s actually indispensable. Shift modifier seems to be available for segment dragging, doesn’t it? I miss this functionality very much and I think than anyone dealing with type or logo design would find this really useful.

 

Any feedback on that gentlemen? Or should it rather be a separate feature request?

 

cheers,

Matt

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7 hours ago, Fatih19 said:

Can't you do this in a flat persepctive first and then use warp/distort tool (when it came out) to then make it not flat?

 

Did you perhaps mean when it comes out? It's not there yet, but even still, I'm afraid warping shapes with straight edges would create waviness. A perspective tool like in Photo would work better for shapes that meet vanishing points.

The website is still a work in progress. The "Comics" and "Shop" sections are not yet ready. Feel free to connect with me and let me know what you like or what can be improved. You can contact me here, on my contact page, YouTube channel, or Twitter account. Thanks and have a great day!

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5 hours ago, Bri-Toon said:

 

Did you perhaps mean when it comes out? It's not there yet, but even still, I'm afraid warping shapes with straight edges would create waviness. A perspective tool like in Photo would work better for shapes that meet vanishing points.

Yes, I did a grammar mistakes. 

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Is this [rotate on plane demo] a new thing or something already existed in another program (you know what program i mean)?

I don't know what program you're alluding to. (You know you can just say it, right? Don't worry; just change your hair color and wear a hood when you go out.) ;)

Similar ability to do what was shown in the demo clip does exist in a few other 2D drawing programs, but not, for example, in Adobe Illustrator which (at least as of CS6) doesn't even provide for creating non-rectilinear page grids at all. In case you're thinking of Adobe Illustrator's 3D Effect plug-in, that's an entirely different thing that shouldn't be confused with the subject of this thread. (And even 3D Effect doesn't let you perform that kind of transformation "live" on the page.)

 

Quote

And how do you make a tilted plane?

This is all 2D. So there is no actual "tilted" plane in the sense of a 3D model. There is just an on-page grid which effectively constitutes a drawing of a tilted plane. You can already do that in Affinity Designer:

  1.  View Menu: Grid and Axis Manager
  2. Turn off the Use automatic grid checkbox
  3. Click the Advanced mode button
  4. Select the Isometric or one of the Dimetric or Trimetric presets from the Grid Type popup menu.

That alone is a far more capable grids implementation than is provided in the majority of mainstream 2D vector drawing programs.

The point of the demo, though, is that Ben has been working on adding some functional geometric association between the grid and on-page objects. The live-shape Star object has been "sent" (using DrawPlus's term) to a "plane" (grid) as you would often want to do in a 2D parallel perspective drawing with something like a logo. But its association is not just a done-and-over-with 2D transformation. The association is still "live" so that Ben can just drag the familiar rotation handle of the Star object's bounding box and effectively "rotate it upon the plane" defined by that grid.

And yes, there are a few programs which can do that, too. My two favorite examples are at opposite extreme ends of the price spectrum: Serif DrawPlus, using its 3D Planes feature, and Corel Technical Designer, using its Projected Axes feature. (In fairness, there are other reasons for the price difference.)

But the fleshing out of this feature set in Affinity Designer is a huge functional advantage over all the current mainstream 2D drawing programs. It constitutes explicit support for an entire drawing discipline that is just as appropriate for 2D drawing programs—and for commercial illustrators—as converging perspective. It's frankly rather laughable that over three decades after the "desktop publishing revolution" of the mid-80s that such things are still almost entirely neglected by the monolithic 2D drawing programs.

Quote

Can't you do this in a flat persepctive first and then use warp/distort tool (when it came out) to then make it not flat?

As mentioned earlier in this thread, this is (so far) about parallel perspective (based on parallel axes), not converging perspective (based on vanishing points). That's why Affinity's grids feature is appropriately called the Grids and Axes Manager.

The whole purpose and intent of "axis-based" (axonometric) drawing—of which isometric is just the most common variation— is to be able to draw "directly into" a mechanically-correct perspective view. The whole idea, dating back hundreds of years, is to not have to draw everything first as rectilinear side views (like traditional drafting) and then construct the desired perspective from those.

So in this sense, while the rotatable star screen grab demonstrates one of the "building block" capabilities, it does not demonstrate the eventual drawing power that capability will yield. The capability proven by the demo is useful in itself for doing things like not just "sending" the logo to the various planes of my billboard example, but also easily rotating it as needed on those planes. But its ramifications are much larger.

So don't get me wrong, that capability is very useful. But the real power represented by the rotating star is in how it will play into empowering an illustrator to "draw directly into" a parallel perspective view of objects which are not so conveniently "boxy" in shape and neatly aligned parallel to each other.

Providing the typical basic rectangular warp tool is fine for simple things like distorting something drawn "in the flat" to fit a photo of a monitor or the side of a cereal box. But that's really minor compared to the scope of more fully supporting an entire long-established drawing discipline which will empower users to do a whole lot more.

JET
 

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20 minutes ago, JET_Affinity said:

I don't know what program you're alluding to. (You know you can just say it, right? Don't worry; just change your hair color and wear a hood when you go out.) ;)

Similar ability to do what was shown in the demo clip does exist in a few other 2D drawing programs, but not, for example, in Adobe Illustrator which (at least as of CS6) doesn't even provide for creating non-rectilinear page grids at all. In case you're thinking of Adobe Illustrator's 3D Effect plug-in, that's an entirely different thing that shouldn't be confused with the subject of this thread. (And even 3D Effect doesn't let you perform that kind of transformation "live" on the page.)

 

This is all 2D. So there is no actual "tilted" plane in the sense of a 3D model. There is just an on-page grid which effectively constitutes a drawing of a tilted plane. You can already do that in Affinity Designer:

  1.  View Menu: Grid and Axis Manager
  2. Turn off the Use automatic grid checkbox
  3. Click the Advanced mode button
  4. Select the Isometric or one of the Dimetric or Trimetric presets from the Grid Type popup menu.

That alone is a far more capable grids implementation than is provided in the majority of mainstream 2D vector drawing programs.

The point of the demo, though, is that Ben has been working on adding some functional geometric association between the grid and on-page objects. The live-shape Star object has been "sent" (using DrawPlus's term) to a "plane" (grid) as you would often want to do in a 2D parallel perspective drawing with something like a logo. But its association is not just a done-and-over-with 2D transformation. The association is still "live" so that Ben can just drag the familiar rotation handle of the Star object's bounding box and effectively "rotate it upon the plane" defined by that grid.

And yes, there are a few programs which can do that, too. My two favorite examples are at opposite extreme ends of the price spectrum: Serif DrawPlus, using its 3D Planes feature, and Corel Technical Designer, using its Projected Axes feature. (In fairness, there are other reasons for the price difference.)

But the fleshing out of this feature set in Affinity Designer is a huge functional advantage over all the current mainstream 2D drawing programs. It constitutes explicit support for an entire drawing discipline that is just as appropriate for 2D drawing programs—and for commercial illustrators—as converging perspective. It's frankly rather laughable that over three decades after the "desktop publishing revolution" of the mid-80s that such things are still almost entirely neglected by the monolithic 2D drawing programs.

As mentioned earlier in this thread, this is (so far) about parallel perspective (based on parallel axes), not converging perspective (based on vanishing points). That's why Affinity's grids feature is appropriately called the Grids and Axes Manager.

The whole purpose and intent of "axis-based" (axonometric) drawing—of which isometric is just the most common variation— is to be able to draw "directly into" a mechanically-correct perspective view. The whole idea, dating back hundreds of years, is to not have to draw everything first as rectilinear side views (like traditional drafting) and then construct the desired perspective from those.

So in this sense, while the rotatable star screen grab demonstrates one of the "building block" capabilities, it does not demonstrate the eventual drawing power that capability will yield. The capability proven by the demo is useful in itself for doing things like not just "sending" the logo to the various planes of my billboard example, but also easily rotating it as needed on those planes. But its ramifications are much larger.

So don't get me wrong, that capability is very useful. But the real power represented by the rotating star is in how it will play into empowering an illustrator to "draw directly into" a parallel perspective view of objects which are not so conveniently "boxy" in shape and neatly aligned parallel to each other.

Providing the typical basic rectangular warp tool is fine for simple things like distorting something drawn "in the flat" to fit a photo of a monitor or the side of a cereal box. But that's really little compared to the scope of more fully supporting an entire long-established drawing discipline which will empower users to do a whole lot more.

JET
 

Thanks a lot for answering my questions! That's a lot of text. So, this is Serif wanted to get ahead of the competition? 

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We always want to get ahead.  We also want to try break the mould and offer things that others haven't yet thought of.

 

A lot of what I'm working on is coming out of my head, rather than referencing other apps. Just imagining what I'd like to be able to achieve and fitting tools to do the job.

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17 minutes ago, Ben said:

We always want to get ahead.  We also want to try break the mould and offer things that others haven't yet thought of.

 

A lot of what I'm working on is coming out of my head, rather than referencing other apps. Just imagining what I'd like to be able to achieve and fitting tools to do the job.

This is a very cool innovation! I still want Serif to have tools that other apps have though cough knife cough warp /distort cough. 

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1 hour ago, Fatih19 said:

This is a very cool innovation! I still want Serif to have tools that other apps have though cough knife cough warp /distort cough. 

Such tools, fortunately, are in their roadmap. Just a matter of time.

Tempus fugit...

Best regards!

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I still want Serif to have tools that other apps have though cough knife cough warp /distort cough.

Sure. We all do. And I'm confident all that is coming. But that doesn't mean they have to be implemented in the same conventional-wisdom "me, too" way, or that I want them to be. I'm as eager as anyone, precisely because I highly desire more innovative thought being applied to even such seemingly mundane capabilities. I'm in a hurry, but not for yet another look-same, do-same program. I already have a slew of those.

One of my favorite cases-in-point is Affinity's value fields. Long before most programs like cough Adobe Illustrator cough figured out that it runs on a computer, a precious few other programs like  cough Macromedia Freehand cough enabled its users to key a math expression directly into its value fields instead of having to turn away from the $1000 computer to open a drawer and drag out a $10 pocket calculator. It was years later that Illustrator caught on, but as of CS6 (the last version available without a rental contract), that capability is still limited to a single kind of math operator (multiplication-division or addition-subtraction, but not multiplication and addition in the same expression, or parentheses).

Spunky Affinity comes along and, right off the bat, betters FreeHand and pretty much all others in the Bezier drawing software category by letting us enter trig functions into value fields. And that plays quite handily into the feature being discussed. Here's how:

Those familiar with the ubiquitous plastic ellipse templates used in mechanical drafting since long before drawing software came along know that the cutouts on those templates are labeled not in terms of height and width (as mainstream drawing programs universally do), but in terms of angle. Why? Because a 25° template has elliptical cutouts which are correctly proportioned to represent a circle which is tilted 25° degrees from the viewer's (and the illustrator's) line-of-sight.

Now, which of those is of most value to an illustrator? "Height and width" may be of value to a designer making a pleasing page layout, but it's pretty useless to an illustrator thinking about the orientation of a circular part of his subject in space.

So you want a 25° ellipse in Affinity? Just key "1" in the width field and "sin(25)" in the height field. That one simple direct unsung capability puts affordable Affinity light years ahead for anyone interested in using their software for mechanically-correct drawing. And as the grids/axis feature becomes functionally enhanced, these two seemingly separate features don't just stand alone, but further empower each other—again, the very definition of functional elegance.

That kind of feature implementation is what used to be called functional elegance; a driving principle in the early days of graphics software, but one which seems to have been long forgotten by the monolithic software vendors. A designer not needing to think of ellipses in terms of tilt angle can just enter height and width values as common. And beginners intimidated by such a capability can work as usual without stumbling over it (or even being aware of it) until they have the need.

I can easily imagine that if Adobe Illustrator ever gains this long overdue practical capability, it will be rolled out with fanfare rivaling New Year's Eve in New York and a clever Adobe-esque name (LiveSmartAngledEllipses!), as if Adobe invented the sine function—and many Illustrator-only devotees will be convinced it did, just as they seem to believe Adobe invented multiple pages and the concept of a 2D converging perspective grid, and will have its own separate "Tool" given predominate space in the already over-crowded main tool bar, right beside the all-important "Lens Flare" tool.

So Affinity Team, please do take your time. Just hurry up about it. ;) 

JET

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9 minutes ago, JET_Affinity said:

Sure. We all do. And I'm confident all that is coming. But that doesn't mean they have to be implemented in the same conventional-wisdom "me, too" way, or that I want them to be. I'm as eager as anyone, precisely because I highly desire more innovative thought being applied to even such seemingly mundane capabilities. I'm in a hurry, but not for yet another look-same, do-same program. I already have a slew of those.

One of my favorite cases-in-point is Affinity's value fields. Long before most programs like cough Adobe Illustrator cough figured out that it runs on a computer, a precious few other programs like  cough Macromedia Freehand cough enabled its users to key a math expression directly into its value fields instead of having to turn away from the $1000 computer to open a drawer and drag out a $10 pocket calculator. It was years later that Illustrator caught on, but as of CS6 (the last version available without a rental contract), that capability is still limited to a single kind of math operator (multiplication-division or addition-subtraction, but not multiplication and addition in the same expression, or parentheses).

Spunky Affinity comes along and, right off the bat, betters FreeHand and pretty much all others in the Bezier drawing software category by letting us enter trig functions into value fields. And that plays quite handily into the feature being discussed. Here's how:

Those familiar with the ubiquitous plastic ellipse templates used in mechanical drafting since long before drawing software came along know that the cutouts on those templates are labeled not in terms of height and width (as mainstream drawing programs universally do), but in terms of angle. Why? Because a 25° template has elliptical cutouts which are correctly proportioned to represent a circle which is tilted 25° degrees from the viewer's (and the illustrator's) line-of-sight.

Now, which of those is of most value to an illustrator? "Height and width" may be of value to a designer making a pleasing page layout, but it's pretty useless to an illustrator thinking about the orientation of a circular part of his subject in space.

So you want a 25° ellipse in Affinity? Just key "1" in the width field and "sin(25)" in the height field. That one simple direct unsung capability puts affordable Affinity light years ahead for anyone interested in using their software for mechanically-correct drawing. And as the grids/axis feature becomes functionally enhanced, these to seemingly separate features don't just stand alone, but further empower each other—again, the very definition of functional elegance. That's why

That kind of feature implementation is what used to be called functional elegance; a driving principle in the early days of graphics software, but one which seems to have been long forgotten by the monolithic software vendors. A designer not needing to think of ellipses in terms of tilt angle can just enter height and width values as common. And beginners intimidated by such a capability can work as usual without stumbling over it (or even being aware of it) until they have the need.

I can easily imagine that if Adobe Illustrator ever gains this long overdue practical capability, it will be rolled out with fanfare rivaling New Year's Eve in New York and a clever Adobe-esque name (LiveSmartAngledEllipses!), as if Adobe invented the sine function—and many Illustrator-only devotees will be convinced it did, just as they seem to believe Adobe invented multiple pages and the concept of a 2D converging perspective grid, and will have its own separate "Tool" given predominate space in the already over-crowded main tool bar, right beside the all-important "Lens Flare" tool.

So Affinity Team, please do take your time. Just hurry up about it. ;) 

JET

Yeah, those Adobe elitist sucks! Adobe is the industry standard because they showed up first, not necessarily because their software is perfect. 

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10 minutes ago, Fatih19 said:

So you want a 25° ellipse in Affinity? Just key "1" in the width field and "sin(25)" in the height field. That one simple direct unsung capability puts affordable Affinity light years ahead for anyone interested in using their software for mechanically-correct drawing. And as the grids/axis feature becomes functionally enhanced, these to seemingly separate features don't just stand alone, but further empower each other—again, the very definition of functional elegance.

This is AWESOME!!

 

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