Show Rotation Center

[evtonic3]

Could it be possible to have the Show Rotation center added as a shortcut?

[evtonic3]

And also a way to place it where the mouse cursor is on the screen, somehow add snapping? lol

[Aammppaa]

The rotation center should already snap based upon the options selected in the Snapping drop-down.

Shortcut for Show Rotation Center would be soooooo helpful! (As would Lock Children!)

Xara Designer uses an elegant method, with an object selected, a single click on the object toggles the handles from Resize to Rotate, and shows the Rotation Center. Another click toggles back.

 

[evtonic3]

4 hours ago, Aammppaa said:

Xara Designer uses an elegant method, with an object selected, a single click on the object toggles the handles from Resize to Rotate, and shows the Rotation Center. Another click toggles back.

 

We need this!

[JET_Affinity]

I don't mean to hijack evtonic3's suggestion here (with which I basically agree), but it's a tiny part of a much larger issue, and Aammppaa's animation serves to exemplify it:

In the animation clip, the transform anchor displays, and Aammppaa demonstrates dragging it to a snapping candidate. However tedious, that much Affinity can do. But forget that for a moment. The larger issue is that Aammppaa then still has to rotate the ellipse by the rotation handles of its bounding box. Now consider:

See that single parameter handle that looks like a node on the edge of the live ellipse? Note that after the first rotation, that "node" is no longer aligned to a bounding box handle. But suppose that is the detail of the selection that Aammppaa needs to rotate into snapping alignment with, say, a pre-existing diagonal line behind the ellipse. How is he going to do that by dragging a bounding box handle?

In this hypothetical situation, Aammppaa needs to:

1. Set the transform anchor where desired.
2. Mousedown on a node of the ellipse (or any other arbitrary path) with snapping accuracy.
3. Rotate the selection by dragging that node until it accurately snaps into alignment with the diagonal line (or any other pre-existing snapping candidate in the whole drawing).

You can't do that with Affinity's rotation interface. You have to drag the rotation by a bounding box rotation handle and just "eyeball" the actual alignment you need. Yet that kind of rotation is far more commonly needed in accurate illustration work than merely dragging bounding box handles to snap somewhere, because the bounding box handles most often don't even lie on the path(s) being rotated. They are most often not even relevant to the precise rotations needed.

This is why other programs (Illustrator is one example) provide transform tools, not just a transform palette, and not just rotation handles on bounding boxes.

Now, you don't have to provide a dedicated Rotate Tool to perform the kind of rotation I'm talking about if you just abhor the idea of adding another icon to the toolbox. A program can simply:

1. Put the selection in its "transform mode" (i.e., do whatever results in its rotation handles appearing).
2. Instead of grabbing a bounding box handle, mousedown on a node (or any other snapable detail of the selection).
3. Drag, and while doing so, sense snapping candidates within proximity  to the mouse (which may or may not still be over the node being dragged).
4. Mouseup when on the desired snapping candidate.

CorelDraw is one example of this treatment.

But the same principle is also valid for other transformations; scaling, skewing, and even reflection. FreeHand enabled the user to perform all those transformation by setting the COT and then dragging the appropriate tool along any direction. So, for example, you could reflect a copy of a selection about an arbitrary diagonal line, or scale it diagonally in the direction of that line, etc.

It's not that transformations based on bounding boxes are useless. Affinity's ability to basically forever retain the rotation value of paths throughout their manipulations can be an important technical advantage which few competing drawing programs provide. (Illustrator does this so erratically that it's of less use than it should be.) But Canvas, for example, does this by enabling the user to toggle back and forth between a selection's "transformed" versus its "untransformed" bounding box with a click on a button. (Affinity, as of yet, doesn't even allow a hard reset of the bounding box, which raises another whole set of related issues.)

It's just that bounding box handles are usually useless for transforming details of one path into alignment with another path, which is something needed countless times every day in serious illustration.

Having tactile transformations (those being performed by dragging with the mouse) and their associated snaps based only on bounding box handles is absolutely debilitating. It's the Achilles' heel of this program. It flies in the face of Affinity's otherwise emphasis on accuracy, and constitutes a very serious disadvantage in comparison to other drawing programs.

JET