Destructive Cropping in designer

[iLLMonkey]

Hi!

Is there any way to do a destructive crop in AD?

Like if I have a bunch of vectors under a layer mask, could i "flatten" the mask to make the mask boundaries permanent in the vectors. This would also mean that any vectors that can't be seen due to the mask would be discarded.

[stokerg]

Hi iLLMonkey and Welcome to the Forums,

 

It's not possible to flatten/merge a mask without rasterizing it.

 

 

[Fixx]

But you could boolean it. No rasterization.

[iLLMonkey]

Thanks for your insight, unfortunately neither rasterisation nor boolean operations didn't suffice my needs.

[MEB]

Hi iLLMonkey,

Welcome to Affinity Forums

The only way to get what you want is to intersect a rectangle (what you are calling the mask) - using multiple copies of it as necessary - with each of the vector objects in your drawing (unless you don't mind to flatten them all into a single object through boolean operations as well).

[R C-R]

@MEB, @stokerg, or anybody else, is there any reason you can think of that would make it logically infeasible to intersect a shape with a group layer, thus avoiding the need to duplicate the shape & apply it individually to each item in the group?

 

@iLLMonkey, if you do not mind my asking, why do you need to destructively crop a number of vector objects?

[iLLMonkey]

@R C-R I need destructive crop because file size is a factor. It's for a very specialized/niche purpose. Inside every mask there is very complex vectorart. It's easy to do in Illustrator, push of a button, but since illustrator is single-threaded it takes between 3-7 hours for it to compute depending on complexity.