How to Fill a hole in a shape in Affinity Designer

[PifLyon]

Hi,

 

I have a shape that is closed and contains a hole. On the picture joined :

- This shape is a result of a boolean combination of 2 identical shapes slightly shifted.

- The stroke is red

- The fill is black.

 

I want to fill the hole in the center of this shape.

1 - I tried all the boolean operations (including divide) with no success, it doesn't "restore" the 2 original shapes as some vertices have been merged.

2 - I tried removing vertices to restore a "filled" shape,  but it is too hard as some vertices are overlapping other ones (is there a way to "hide" vertices like in Blender ?)

3 - I could redraw a shape on top of the original, but It's too hard because of the complexity of the bezier curves.

4 - I tried to make a square nested in this shape's layer, but it make the square appears only in the "fill" part of this shape (the black part).

 

How can I fill the center of this shape ? 

 

Thank you, Cédric.

Edited March 19, 2018 by PifLyon
Added part 4.

[dutchshader]

copy the layer and use the bolean divide, al little clean up afterwards, and you have a fill

[PifLyon]

Sorry dutchshader, but as I said part 1) Divide makes a mess.

Your advice seems not to take care of what I said in part 2).

Thank you for your help. 

[dutchshader]

Sorry, missed that part.

Could you post the designer file?

[PifLyon]

Yes, here it is. If you find a way, it will be nice. 

Remember : I'm not asking you to recreate the shape for me, I search a "speedy" way to solve my problem 

oreiller-shape.afdesign

[dutchshader]

the only way i could find was:

copy the shape, ungroup, layer>expand stroke, divide. clean up.

oreiller-shape2.afdesign

 

[PifLyon]

I'm trying this, but I don't find "Layer>Expand stroke"...  Where is it ?

(Seen your result that is good, want to reproduce it).

[dutchshader]

here it is

[carl123]

If you don't mind the pixies adding a pixel layer you can always utilise the Flood Fill Tool

 

oreiller-shape.afdesign

[PifLyon]

NICE !! That works fine. I hope I will remember this method that is really quick.

 

Thank you dutchshader.

 

Note : I did not find "Expand Stroke" because of a the french translation "Vectoriser le contour" (which could be translated to "vectorize outline").

 

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, dutchshader said:

the only way i could find was:

copy the shape, ungroup, layer>expand stroke, divide. clean up.

Wow!!! Adding the expand stroke step to make cleanup easier is a brilliant solution I never would have thought of on my own.

 

As I am sure you all know, what makes creating a separate fill layer for a "Curves" shape like this one so tedious is that its two paths cross each other at two points along its top, so there the 'outer' path becomes the 'inner' one & visa versa. Similar path crossings occur frequently in vector documents I work with, particularly in ones I import into Affinity Designer from other sources, so what I have been doing to edit them so they have only non-crossing outer & inner paths is to first divide them, then tediously find where they cross & break each of them at the appropriate nodes to separate the paths into individual outer & inner segments. Next, even more tediously I join all the outer or inner path segments to make a single outer or inner path. I either do the same for all the other segments if I want to preserve the other path or delete them if I don't.

 

Needless to say, for complex shapes with lots of crossed paths this can be a very time consuming, confusing process so prone to errors that I often just give up. I am not sure how well adding the expand stroke step will work for all of these files, but even if it just works for some multi-path shapes in some of them, it will save me tons of time (& frustration!) so thank you one hundred times over for posting this!