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Transform Tools


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One feature I quite like in InDesign are the scale, rotate, shear, etc. tools, because it lets me work quite fast—the anchor point can be set manually and the transformation can be done from anywhere on the screen, no need to look for the edges of the frame or zoom / pan around.

I understand the trend to leave out dedicated tools which can do only one thing, but I find it more usable to have greater tolerance available for editing and transforming objects.

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  • 2 weeks later...

 

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I understand the trend to leave out dedicated tools which can do only one thing...

There is no need to couch this request in apologetic terms. The provision of proper transform tools is arguably even more important in Affinity Designer.

In fact, I found this post while searching for the subject (I thought) in the Designer forum, so as to not start a repetitive thread.

Transform tools should not be characterized as "dedicated  tools which can do only one thing" because they do too many crucially important things that merely bounding-box based transforms (whether in a transform palette or as bounding box handles) fail to do.

Just one example:

When an ellipse is used to represent a "tilted" (foreshortened) circle, its minor diameter should be aligned to its "thrust line" (the centerline about which the circle "orbits").

A common method for doing that is:

  1. Mousedown on one of the ellipse's nodes.
  2. Drag the whole ellipse by that node to snap it to somewhere along an existing line of the drawing in progress (the thrust line).
  3. Set the center of rotation at that point of snapping intersection.
  4. Rotate the whole ellipse about the center of rotation by dragging another of its nodes and snapping it also to the thrust line.

Those kinds of transforms are typically done with a single Rotate Tool that can:

  • Set the center of transformation with a single, snap-sensitive click.
  • Snap to any detail of the selection.
  • Rotate the selection by snapping that dragged detail to any unselected snap candidate.

You can't do that with just bounding boxes when the detail that you need to drag and snap to other positions is not one of the bounding box's handles, which is by far more often the case in serious illustration. And the same principle is valid for page layout design, wherein the assumption also should not be made that everything that needs to be accurately transformed is not necessarily just corners of bounding boxes.

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...the scale, rotate, shear, etc. tools...the anchor point can be set manually and the transformation can be done from anywhere on the screen...

Affinity does let you set the center of transformation to anywhere. That is not the missing functionality. The problem is that, first, the transformation anchor is only available when the black pointer is active (in other words, when the current selection bounding box is displayed), and second, because the needed transformation can even then only be performed by manipulating bounding box handles, not by dragging snap-able elements of the selection.

In the Affinity Designer "1.7 sneak peek" thread, Ben posts a video clip of upcoming functionality for performing transformations on sub-selections of Nodes. But so far as I can tell, that video clip still exemplifies the same problem, because it still just draws a bounding box around those sub-selected Nodes, and all the transformations still seem to require manipulation of the infernal bounding box handles, not of the specific node(s) of interest.

If I'm right, and not just overlooking some esoteric keyboard shortcut or something, it's simply substandard in comparison to other drawing programs. It is seriously debilitating of the work toward drawing with accuracy in the Affinity apps.

I'd love to be wrong about this.

JET

 

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@JET_Affinity ,

Part (?) of the new nodes/transformation/Snap tools are in Publisher now. Most of the bêta testers are testings and commenting text/styles/frames/master pages, etc., but I didn't see any comment about those.

Perhaps it's not the right app to test them, but since they are in APub, and it's possible to comment and debug them (before 1.7 release of Affinity suite?), your comments about them would be interesting.

Warning: AD files modified in Apub can't be opened back in AD (no backward compatibility), so doing/debuging this would improve the tools but wouldn't be productive unless the work can be usable once exported to PDF or SVG…

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Effectively, it's not here yet.

If we want to do a rotation different than the center of the selected nodes, we would have to create a circle that encompass the nodes we want to rotate with its center at the exact center of rotation we want.
We can select more than one objects and sub-select the desired nodes > the ones of the circle + the ones we wanted to rotate, then rotation of thoses, and deletion of the circle once done.

But a center-of-transform for more than rotation would be better, perhaps a perspective and a transform grids.

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Is it possible, either in APub or ADesigner to have 2 objects selected and transformed (morphed) into another object?

Or rotate, scale etc. I don't have Indesign so I don't know if the initial post is about this idea.

Even if APub can't do it perhaps ADesigner can, but I haven't found it yet.

What I mean can be seen in this screenshot below.

screenshot_564.png

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2 objects selected and transformed (morphed) into another object?

Your use of "transformed" and "morphed" suggests the feature generically referred to as blends. But your screenshot depicts and your use of "rotate and scale" suggests a reiterative transformation, often called "power duplication."  Results can be similar, but they are not the same thing.

Object blending is not yet offered in Designer (nor, therefore in Publisher). But because it's been regarded sort of a staple for vector-based drawing programs since the early days, I'm sure it's planned. (As I recall, it's probably already on the road map.)

Most mainstream drawing programs at least provide for ordinary path blends (interpolating between constructs consisting of Bezier paths). Illustrator's Blend feature can blend between most anything, including most anything stored as a Symbol, and live effects applied to the key objects. In this sense, "live effects" means most object attributes (Graphic Styles, for example), whether they are actually called a "Live Effect" in Illustrator's interface. For example, in Illustrator, you can blend between instances of paths to which its 3D Effect has been applied (with the potential for memory problems if done too cavalierly).

Reiterative transformations, however, are provided for in Affinity Designer, by use of the Transform commands in combination with the Duplicate command. So that may be accessible in Publisher, too. (I just haven't had more than a few minutes' time to explore Publisher yet.) Try searching for "duplicate" in its documentation.

Generally, the differences between blends and reiterated transforms are:

As usually implemented, Blends start with "key" objects and then automatically interpolate the intermediate steps between them in terms of decoration attributes (strokes, fills, other effects) and some transformations (scale, rotation, skewing) and initial positions. For translations (movement) along curves, though, they rely on following a separate path used as the spine. Because the intermediate steps are automatically interpolated, your control over certain things like precise spacing is somewhat limited by whatever parameters provided in the specific program's Blend interface. So, for example, in the typical spiral-like transform as in your screenshot, the spiral is usually a separate path, and your control over the spacing is somewhat limited, but still adjustable after the blend is made.

In reiterated transforms, the spiral is just a consequence of the precise values you've entered for the scale and rotation transforms. After it's done, it's just a stack of separate and individually-sized, scaled, rotated copies of the original.

So blends would be more in line with the concept of "morphing one object into another." So-called power duplication would be more in line with just generating repeated transformations of copies of the same object (as in your screenshot).

JET

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1 hour ago, JET_Affinity said:

So blends would be more in line with the concept of "morphing one object into another." So-called power duplication would be more in line with just generating repeated transformations of copies of the same object (as in your screenshot).

Thx for the explanation and clarifying my ignorence on this topic. For me blends and power duplications were the same. BTW the screen I made was done with a retro-DTP app from the late 80s. 

I played with the duplicate function in Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher (on Mac CMD-J) .

By placing the colored rectangle. I press CMD-J to duplicate it. Move it around with the mouse, scale and rotate it. Consecutive CMD-J commands does replicate, scale and rotate the rectangle. 

The same worked with the star shaped object. It works but it's another aproach. I was used to a menu.

 

screenshot_565.png

Edited by cyberhusky
screenshot
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On 9/9/2018 at 4:40 PM, JET_Affinity said:

Transform tools should not be characterized as "dedicated  tools which can do only one thing" because they do too many crucially important things that merely bounding-box based transforms (whether in a transform palette or as bounding box handles) fail to do.

Thanks, JET. I'd love to see better transform tools implemented soon

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