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The ‘Expand Stroke’ feature has been acknowledged as needing improvement. In the meantime, you can get better results by enlarging the object (by a factor of ten or more) before expanding the stroke, and then shrinking it back down again afterwards.

For a simple ring shape, use the Donut Tool.

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  • 2 years later...

Why not use the doughnut shape tool?

iMac 27" 2019 Somona 14.3.1, iMac 27" Affinity Designer, Photo & Publisher V1 & V2, Adobe, Inkscape, Vectorstyler, Blender, C4D, Sketchup + more... XP-Pen Artist-22E, - iPad Pro 12.9  
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7 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

Why not use the doughnut shape tool?

I suggested that to the OP more than two years ago, but I don’t think we should assume that @LogosByDim is necessarily referring to simple rings.

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Well, I was designing something with a stroke that I made to a vector brush. In fact, that's not even a vector brush. It's a high quality raster image put on path, from what I can tell. And Designer isn't supporting to expand such a stroke. Need improvement here.

Edited by LogosByDim
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For affinity 1.9 I suggest to make an improvement in the sustainability of the vector brush function. The brushes should at least be in true vector format, so that we can work with 100% vectors before we decide to rasterize an object for a reason. After all, wr are talking about significant drawback when it comes to quality and versatility of these brushes. That's my opinion at least.

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5 minutes ago, LogosByDim said:

That's my opinion at least.

Yours and many others, myself included, it baffles me that we cannot create vector brushes from elements selected while in affinity and have to export to import a texture that is raster, it’s like having dry water. 🤔

Alfred: don’t you dare mention dry ice 😏

iMac 27" 2019 Somona 14.3.1, iMac 27" Affinity Designer, Photo & Publisher V1 & V2, Adobe, Inkscape, Vectorstyler, Blender, C4D, Sketchup + more... XP-Pen Artist-22E, - iPad Pro 12.9  
B| (Please refrain from licking the screen while using this forum)

Affinity Help - Affinity Desktop Tutorials - Feedback - FAQ - most asked questions

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3 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

Yours and many others, myself included, it baffles me that we cannot create vector brushes from elements selected while in affinity and have to export to import a texture that is raster, it’s like having dry water. 🤔

Alfred: don’t you dare mention dry ice 😏

Something that tires me the most, is that the vector brushes cannot be expanded to a curve with nodes, a true vector shape. It's just a raster image, instead of a "vector brush". 

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Hi LogosByDim,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)
The current brushes in Affinity Designer (Designer Persona) are indeed based on raster textures repeated or stretched along a path. Raster based brushes have the advantage of reproducing organic and other textures in a way pure vector brushes can't due their cleanness/rigid nature. There's plans to expand/improve the vector brush engine in Designer to also include pure vector based brushes. Currently the brush raster engine (you can find in Pixel Persona and Affinity Photo) is much more developed than its vector counterpart. Thanks for your feedback/support.

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33 minutes ago, MEB said:

Hi LogosByDim,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)
The current brushes in Affinity Designer (Designer Persona) are indeed based on raster textures repeated or stretched along a path. Raster based brushes have the advantage of reproducing organic and other textures in a way pure vector brushes can't due their cleanness/rigid nature. There's plans to expand/improve the vector brush engine in Designer to include also include pure vector based brushes. Currently the brush raster engine (you can find in Pixel Persona and Affinity Photo) is much more developed than its vector counterpart. Thanks for your feedback/support.

Thanks MEB for clarifying that, it's good to know. I understand about the texture being more natural and organic, and that's an advantage. 

I recently finished a logo I made and wanted to be able to change the color of the whole Design with a singel fill color. This was not possible, since the vector brush stroke couldn't be expanded. I had to manually select all the brushes, choose stroke color, change it, and then select the rest of the design and choose fill, and change it. My goal was to have only a fill color on the whole design. 

In some elements with stroke, I expanded it easily, and unified the stroke and the fill to make it one shape I could color entirely with one fill color. That was my aim with the brushes as well. Is there another way to do so in Designer? Regarding the brushes?

Edited by LogosByDim
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4 minutes ago, MEB said:

Hi LogosByDim,
Try to group all objects and apply a Colour Overlay FX to the group. Does it work for you in that case?

Hi MEB, 
Fairly new to Designer to be honest and had never uset the effects. I found the option and applied it over the logo and it worked. The whole design changed color. Thank you the great solution. Should this be used as a temporary way to try out different colors? Because I'm not sure if any fill or stroke color is changed, just an overlay is applied? Does that overlay function the same way as a normal fill and stroke color when exporting the design?

Thanks!

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On ‎8‎/‎21‎/‎2020 at 3:03 AM, MEB said:

Hi LogosByDim,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)
The current brushes in Affinity Designer (Designer Persona) are indeed based on raster textures repeated or stretched along a path. Raster based brushes have the advantage of reproducing organic and other textures in a way pure vector brushes can't due their cleanness/rigid nature. There's plans to expand/improve the vector brush engine in Designer to also include pure vector based brushes. Currently the brush raster engine (you can find in Pixel Persona and Affinity Photo) is much more developed than its vector counterpart. Thanks for your feedback/support.

Will these plans include true vector brush capability (no raster) for textured brushes?  I just purchased a bunch of vector brushes, but until I started reading the forums here, I had no idea the vector brushs were not truly vector.  :(  Are there any workarounds?

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52 minutes ago, JulieBeth said:

Will these plans include true vector brush capability (no raster) for textured brushes?  I just purchased a bunch of vector brushes, but until I started reading the forums here, I had no idea the vector brushs were not truly vector.  :(  Are there any workarounds?

Hi JulieBeth, as far as I can see, the vector brushes are indeed high quality raster images that look like vectors. I think the files of the brushes themselves are rasters, (I'm not sure). Perhaps the engine works only with rasters as of for now.

If you still don't like the outcome, and made the purchase within 14 days, you may be able to request a refund based on the case you just mentioned.

It is indeed a little unfair to promote the brushes as "used with vector brush tool" when they aren't true vectors. 

But the brushes allow you to create effects that you might otherwise have to make manually. Which is extremely time consuming.

Edited by LogosByDim
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On 8/21/2020 at 9:49 AM, LogosByDim said:

Hi MEB, 
Fairly new to Designer to be honest and had never uset the effects. I found the option and applied it over the logo and it worked. The whole design changed color. Thank you the great solution. Should this be used as a temporary way to try out different colors? Because I'm not sure if any fill or stroke color is changed, just an overlay is applied? Does that overlay function the same way as a normal fill and stroke color when exporting the design?

Thanks!

Hi LogosByDim,
You can use it to try different colours but it doesn't change the original fill or stroke of the object it's just an overlay. Same thing if you use a Recolour Adjustment which can also be used for the same purpose (it also doesn't change the fill or stoke of the object). Regarding export, both the Layers effects and the Recolour Adjustment will force the rasterisation of the object so it will not be exported as vectors.

If you really need the logo as a single vector object, duplicate the logo layers, and use the boolean operations (add, subtract etc) to create a single shape from all logo elements. If some of them have a stroke you can use the command Layer > Expand Stroke to turn the stroke into a shape then add it to the rest of the elements until you end up with a single shape. You can then duplicate it to try different/compare colours using the Fill colour of the shape which will be exported as a vector object.

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23 hours ago, JulieBeth said:

Will these plans include true vector brush capability (no raster) for textured brushes?  I just purchased a bunch of vector brushes, but until I started reading the forums here, I had no idea the vector brushs were not truly vector.  :(  Are there any workarounds?

Hi @JulieBeth,
Welcome to affinity Forums :)
There's no way to convert the raster textures/brushes into vector objects within the program (we don't have a tracing engine). As @LogosByDim pointed out if the textures used for the brushes are high res enough you shouldn't have trouble exporting/printing the final artwork. If you do need them as vectors for some reason i'm afraid there's isn't much you can do other than tracing them using an external program/utiliy.
We do hope to add support for brushes based on true vector objects at some point.

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2 hours ago, MEB said:

Hi LogosByDim,
You can use it to try different colours but it doesn't change the original fill or stroke of the object it's just an overlay. Same thing if you use a Recolour Adjustment which can also be used for the same purpose (it also doesn't change the fill or stoke of the object). Regarding export, both the Layers effects and the Recolour Adjustment will force the rasterisation of the object so it will not be exported as vectors.

If you really need the logo as a single vector object, duplicate the logo layers, and use the boolean operations (add, subtract etc) to create a single shape from all logo elements. If some of them have a stroke you can use the command Layer > Expand Stroke to turn the stroke into a shape then add it to the rest of the elements until you end up with a single shape. You can then duplicate it to try different/compare colours using the Fill colour of the shape which will be exported as a vector object.

Hi MEB, thank you for a thorough response. Expanding the strokes is exactly what I tried to do for all elements in the design except 2 strokes. In the badge I designed, these are the outlines which I created using a vector brush stroke. Since there is no way to convert them to vector objects, I grouped them and colored them in using stroke color. Then I colored the rest of the design with a fill color. That's the closest I could get, dividing the design in two parts. Thanks a lot for helping out!

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