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Sneak peeks for 1.7


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"Everything is awesome".... (for anyone who's seen the Lego movie)

 

Go one better - if you have a specific size, try putting that in the width field, then "w * sin(25)" in the height field.  Then it'll be created to the correct size without needing to post-scale.

 

Like JET says, there is room for improving on these tools, and I'll try figure out ways of streamlining these things as I get further into it.

 

....I do have a very long to-do list though, so I may have to flip between what I'm working on.

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2 minutes ago, Ben said:

"Everything is awesome"....

 

Go one better - if you have a specific size, try putting that in the width field, then "w * sin(25)" in the height field.  Then it'll be created to the correct size without needing to post-scale.

You guys should use your assistant (the one that said "you are drawing in new layer") to market the app in free trial. Like, somekind of tutorial but it doesn't explain every tool. Just the one that you don't find in other program because I never know you could do the things you just tell me I can do. 

Edited by Fatih19
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You know, we do have documentation that covers a lot of this stuff.......

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2 minutes ago, Ben said:

You know, we do have documentation that covers a lot of this stuff.......

Yeah, but someone who came from another program and want to try out this program doesn't see the tutorial you put in vimeo. I only watch couple of video to learn the interface and doing some basic stuff. Someone who has 20 years of experience in AI won't try this program and said "I totally need a tutorial for this program". Just the feature that is uncommon on other program. 

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I mean written document.  Open the Help, and search for "expressions for field input"

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2 minutes ago, Ben said:

I mean written document.  Open the Help, and search for "expressions"

But that's even worse because you have to read them. Except if the help section have "uncommon features" section that the assistance would point out when you first open the app. No hate, just want to give constructive criticism. 

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Adobe is the industry standard because they showed up first...

Actually, in those years, Adobe Illustrator (1987) and Aldus FreeHand (1988) were practically simultaneous, given that FreeHand's drawing engine was largely based on its progenitor, Altsys Fontographer (1986). Right out the gate, FreeHand surpassed the functionality of Illustrator (Illustrator could not even "edit in preview mode"; you had to switch to "outline mode" to edit paths), and Illustrator continued to  trail years behind FreeHand's functionality throughout their competitive history.

Having lived through all that (my first hands-on exposure to Bezier drawing being Fontographer on a Mac Plus), I simply attribute Adobe's dominance to the fact that it created PostScript. That's what made it the "household word." All the buzz of the "desktop publishing revolution" was about "Adobe PostScript." So anything with the Adobe brand on the box was considered the "safe bet."

JET

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3 minutes ago, JET_Affinity said:

Actually, in those years, Adobe Illustrator (1987) and Aldus FreeHand (1988) were practically simultaneous, given that FreeHand's drawing engine was largely based on its progenitor, Altsys Fontographer (1986). Right out the gate, FreeHand surpassed the functionality of Illustrator (Illustrator could not even "edit in preview mode"; you had to switch to "outline mode" to edit paths), and Illustrator continued to  trail years behind FreeHand's functionality throughout their competitive history.

Having lived through all that (my first hands-on exposure to Bezier drawing being Fontographer on a Mac Plus), I simply attribute Adobe's dominance to the fact that it created PostScript. That's what made it the "household word." All the buzz of the "desktop publishing revolution" was about "Adobe PostScript." So anything with the Adobe brand on the box was considered the "safe bet."

JET

You know some deep history about these programs! 

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But that's even worse because you have to read them.

Egads! ;)

It tickles me how often in the Illustrator User Forum, users struggling to get their heads around its convoluted interface so often say they are "visual learners." Every time it makes me think, "Um...you do realize you are reading the answer you just thanked me for, right?"

But seriously, since the early days, I have made it my habit (and advice to beginners) to start by not just reading through the manual start-to-finish, but actually work through the operations it describes as you go. In the end, that is so much faster than asking random "how to" questions in online forums or watching videos because it is, first, accurate (amateur videos and answers in online forums are so often just cases of the blind leading the blind) and, second, more thorough. Plus, actually sitting at the computer with the manual and playing with the functions as they are described removes most of the painful boredom, and encourages experimentation in a sensible sequence in the learning process, as opposed to struggling with operations as they happen to occur at random.

 

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This is AWESOME!!

I suspect it's already occurred to you, Befehr, but...

Create a cylindrical extrusion along the Y (vertical) axis in isometric:

  1. Ellipse tool: Drag an ellipse onto the page.
  2. Transform palette: Set its width (major diameter) to the true measure of the circle it represents. Set its minor diameter to "w*sin(35.26)".
  3. PenTool: Line Mode. Mousedown on the center of the ellipse and shiftDrag any arbitrary distance upward.
  4. Transform palette: Set the 9-point proxy icon to one of the bottom points and set height to "[true measure length of the cylinder] * cos(35.26)".
  5. CopyDrag the ellipse by its center and snap to the top of the centerline.

(Yeah, you could have just moved  a copy of the ellipse vertically by the cosine of the iso angle, but in the real world, it's usually advantageous to draw centerlines of extrusions.)

Beyond that:

  1. Select one of the ellipses.
  2. Click the Pie button.

You now have an interactive isometric protractor for finding correct measures of off-axis lengths rotated about the Y axis. Just key the needed angle(s) in the Start and End fields.

Get accustomed to this and you can easily start thinking "Who needs grids?" ;) 

JET

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New to the Affinity family and so far I'm seriously quite happy.  I am very excited to see the updates coming in these programs.  Feels really nice to be liberated from the Adobe matrix!  Keep up the excellent work!

Affinity Photo & Designer

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Childish...?

 

There is the option to make the icons monotone, if that's what you are getting at....

 

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Jet_Affinity is a pleasure to read what you write ... about the success of Adobe I can say that (since I lived everything from the first version) the power comes from the PostScript.

Often with other software, like Freehand, you got excellent results, but unfortunately many times these generated errors in rip software and you could not get good print films!

 

As for the speech of technical drawings, isonometric etc ... I add that even for packaging design all this is damn interesting.
Often when you need to represent a package, in addition to more useful 3D renderings for a photorealistic and marketing representation,

an axonometric drawing for assembly instructions is useful.

 

However, all that up to now shown by Ben is extraordinary.

 

Ciao

Fabio

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3 hours ago, ajharok said:

Love Affinity designer and photo, but for me the UI looks a bit childish ;) 

 

I better hope "childish" is meant as a compliment here, standing for "nice looking and easy to use" ... otherwise read this:

Seriously? You are working in graphics / design and don't like a colourful and fun, light looking user interface?

I appreciate every bit of colour, fun and lightness I can get in my life ... and when this colour is part of an awesome software I use every day, even better!

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I miss Freehand everyday. Simple UI and speedy performance.

The most telling detail of FreeHand's elegance was its selection and path manipulation interface. Illustrators who never used it just don't realize that its single selection tool did more—and did it more intuitively and efficiently— than any program with the now pandemic separate node selection tool. The insistence on two separate main selection tools is so ingrained due to Illustrator's market dominance that I fear most users will never know how much better it could be.

I knew FreeHand's demise was immanent as soon as Macromedia added the completely useless white pointer, just to appease Illustrator users. (It was literally just that. It wasn't until the very last version that the white pointer actually gained any ability in FreeHand that couldn't be done with the black pointer; and even that was a token detail, unworthy of a separate tool.)

Nonetheless, up to that point, FreeHand underwent marvelous advancements while under Macromedia's control. A huge one was its complete interface rebuild to an Inspector-based one. Everything you needed to know about the current selection was visible and settable in the efficiently designed Inspector. No drawing program's attempt at so called control panels and object attributes ribbons has come close to the efficiency of FreeHand's Inspector palette. Once again, Illustrator's schizophrenic attempt—which can't seem to figure out if it's a tool options bar or an object attributes bar or a commands bar—wins worst-of-class.

(Ironically, FileMaker Pro—a relational database management program, of all things—comes close with the comprehensive Inspector palette of its Layout Mode interface.)

My nostalgia is not rose-colored glasses, though. Even when FreeHand was in its hey day, I was quite vocally bemoaning the fact that the interfaces of all the Bezier drawing programs (including FreeHand) were actually more analogous to a mere "line up table" or "paste up table" (a glorified light table with a T-square, used for flat design, stripping film, etc.) than to a proper drawing table equipped with a Mutoh track drafter (used for illustration). It was so refreshing when FreeHand's full-blown Perspective Grids feature appeared. I wonder how few know the one in Adobe Illustrator is a direct copy of it; just one of those things for which Adobe gets the credit by merely acquiring it from elsewhere, and very belatedly adding it to Illustrator. And though I sung its praises when it first appeared in FreeHand, I was deeply disappointed that they had chosen to address converging perspective before parallel perspective, which I think is arguably more amenable to 2D drawing programs by its nature.

Still today, with few exceptions, almost everything in a "drawing" program's interface is tyrannically oriented toward the horizontal and vertical. When drawing, an Illustrator couldn't care less about the page edges. An illustrator is thinking in terms of the spatial orientation and angular view of the subject being drawn. When you really think about it, we are usually struggling against the conventional-wisdom features when trying to draw real-world things. After over thirty years of ostensibly "rocket fast" computer and software development, little has really changed from that in the 2D drawing genre.

That's why I find it so refreshing whenever I see a feature explicitly designed to support illustration in a mainstream Bezier drawing program, like Affinity's axonometric grids. Axonometric is a particular passion with me, because it's such an elegant system. It's so neat to watch your constructions just come together and fit perfectly together throughout the drawing with geometric accuracy equal to that of mechanical drafting. And especially today its application is far broader for commercial illustration than commonly assumed. I blame the misconception on decades of neglect, both in software and in general art classes.

By the way, I never had a FreeHand file fail to RIP. In the days of slower processors and early PostScript, too many users indiscriminately built their files using all kinds of willy-nilly, sloppy, convoluted constructs without a thought beyond on the monitor appearance, thereby effectively begging for output problems. Such problems occurred with all graphics applications. CorelDraw gained an undeserved bad reputation in that regard, largely just because it was so feature-rich. Too many users still do the same today, but the output systems have become much more forgiving in terms of error handling.

For one example, back then stray points (single-point paths) could cause output problems, and Adobe Illustrator (precisely because of its awkward selection interface) is the program most prone to inadvertently creating stray points.

JET

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Wow @Ben, I've just downloaded and watched all the clips with the new features. Well, I'm an UX designer and I've been working a lot with icon design lately, so what got me excited about these new features are all the snapping options for the node tool. REALLY AWESOME.

 

I'm not sure if this should be posted in this topic, but since it's related to shape manipulation, I was wondering if would it be in your roadmap a set of features to resize shapes with keyboard shortcuts. Similar to what Sketch does:

  • cmd+right arrow to increase width by 1px
  • cmd+left arrow to decrease width by 1px
  • cmd+shift+right arrow to increase by 10px (or specified amount in settings)
  • cmd+shift+left arrow to decrease by 10px (or specified amount in settings)

Also, differently from what Sketch does, we could benefit from the object origin (pivot), so object could shrink or grow from an specific point relative to the shape, instead of just from top left corner.

 

Congratulations for the awesome work!

 

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You could try with the Transformation Panel. I hove the pointer over the width number and use the mouse wheel (Windows user) to increment/decrement by 1 pixel. I'm sure the gestures on the Touch Pad would do the same.

Best regards!

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On 2/16/2018 at 1:36 PM, Mithferion said:

You could try with the Transformation Panel. I hove the pointer over the width number and use the mouse wheel (Windows user) to increment/decrement by 1 pixel. I'm sure the gestures on the Touch Pad would do the same.

Best regards!

Actually, I use a mouse :) I didn't know about the scroll wheel trick. It's fantastic!

However, I also think that keyboard shortcuts for that would be great.

Thanks for the tip!

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39 minutes ago, hperticarati said:

Actually, I use a mouse

 

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On 26/01/2018 at 4:11 PM, Ben said:

As MEB says, no plans to add anything proper 3D.  But, the example Frank made of cloning and joining shapes to provide a 3-dimensional extrusion - that might be something we can do, but the result would still be 2D shapes.

 

This would be *extremely* useful for creating a 'long shadow' effect in icons etc. (See attached image)

 

Right now I tend to duplicate the parent object, then edit the nodes along a 45° axis. Extruding would save loads of time!

Stain Treatment.png

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As a brand new user I have used the software for maybe a week now and found some "interesting" quirks:

using the up- down- arrow keys changes exposure in increments of 1.0 - a huge increment

using the same keys on white balance changes the WB by 1 degree - a tiny increment

a horizon levelling tool would be really nice

showing the brush size before the pen commits to the screen would be nice

and non-destrctive developing (supposed to happen soon) would be a major, major improvement. And while you're at it: saving the developing information in a tiny sidecar file would certainly be the way to go.

There are other issues, but I am still working my way through the tutorial videos. Here I would find written tutorials more helpful as one can follow them step by step.

At this point I am intrigued, though Affinity won't replace ACR quite yet.

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Doesn't Adobe Photoshop have this feature where you create meshes/grids and images stick to it in proper perspective?

If you are talking about Photoshop's 3D features, this is an entirely different thing.

This is entirely 2D; there is no actual 3D modeling going on.

This is entirely vector-based drawing; there is no raster imaging involved at all in the example sketch. The Lookin' UP graphic consists entirely of normal Bezier paths on all the "surfaces" shown. It's just copies of the graphic at lower left that have been transformed using regular—but somewhat automated—2D transformations (rotate, scale, skew). The copies of it on the billboard are just as normally editable as the original.

This is not painting a raster-based texture and mapping it onto the surface meshes of a 3D model.

This is about using a 2D grids feature and live 2D transformation features in software to help facilitate a 2D axis-based drawing discipline which dates back to long before computers, just as traditional "vanishing point" perspective construction methods also long predate computers, and are facilitated in some 2D drawing programs.

JET

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