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Simple subtraction of two shapes doesn't work


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I have a ring / donut shape. On top I have a square, at an angle. I am trying to subtract the square from the ring, to create a letter C. But Affinity Designer doesn't seem to be able to do this. All I get after subtracting is a weird shape. See below:

I've just retried the subtraction and it now works. I've tried a third time and again I get the strange shape. It is inconsistent.

 

 

Screenshot 2018-11-07 at 9.59.25 am.png

Screenshot 2018-11-07 at 9.59.33 am.png

CW logo big C.afdesign

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When I open your attached file I can see the following, which is what I would expect as the result of that subtract operation.

shown_result.jpg.b838c01efca488ce23cb09df9da07dc7.jpg

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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Yes, I was able to duplicate the behavior. Tried duplicating "donuts" & diamonds, and donuts and rotated squares. The anomalous results happened about half the time. The position of the corner of the diamond/square was at the center of the donut. I found that it the corner was shifted away from the exact center, the results were as expected. This also happened w. the composite operation.

AnomalousSubtract.thumb.jpg.4697127bd7f317e7aa7c200a8860ad4c.jpg

iMac 27" Retina, c. 2015: OS X 10.11.5: 3.3 GHz I c-5: 32 Gb,  AMD Radeon R9 M290 2048 Mb

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Huion WH1409 tablet

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1 hour ago, Markeeee said:

I am trying to subtract the square from the ring, to create a letter C.

It would be easier to do that with a single Pie shape. Then you get all the benefits of Affinity's dynamic shape editing.

Set the Hole radius to make the hole in the centre,

hole.jpg.5347e5b5ae7f0e5505fb8c583933cece.jpg

then you can drag the red handles to where you want.

pie.jpg.3613bca4128a190eea8fcf79431684f1.jpg

P.S. I love pie :)

Windows PCs. Photo and Designer, latest non-beta versions.

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Scaling the diamond down a tad also gets expected results so from 85.46mm to 85.00mm

iMac 27" 2019 Sequoia 15.0 (24A335), 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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53 minutes ago, MEB said:

We are aware of a few issues with the boolean operations (already logged to be looked at). It's possible certain cases fail to give correct results or generate superfluous objects. We hope to improve this in future versions. Thanks for your report.

Wow. The first boolean operation I need to do in Affinity and it can't do it. And it's the easiest subtraction. This really sucks.

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  • Staff

Hi Markeeee,
I'm sorry it didn't work for you right on the first time. As I mentioned we have this issue logged, along with some sample files for us to test against new/revised code. Most boolean operations should work reliably but there's certain cases where the code does fail. I understand it can be frustrating. We are doing our best to fix those and other issues. Thanks for your understanding.

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Hi, Markee,

You just got lucky. I've been using Designer for over a year now, a minimum of 2 hours a day, sometimes 6, and this is the 1st time I've run into this. As toltec mentioned, the usual practice would be to convert the ellipse to a donut/pie.

Also, I messed w. various shapes of triangles. Didn't get the problem. Seems like this problem is limited 2 those 2 shapes, in exactly that alignment.

iMac 27" Retina, c. 2015: OS X 10.11.5: 3.3 GHz I c-5: 32 Gb,  AMD Radeon R9 M290 2048 Mb

iPad 12.9" Retina, iOS 10, 512 Gb, Apple pencil

Huion WH1409 tablet

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On 11/7/2018 at 11:04 AM, toltec said:

It would be easier to do that with a single Pie shape. Then you get all the benefits of Affinity's dynamic shape editing.

Hi. Yes the pie tool is great. Thanks for the heads up.

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On 11/7/2018 at 1:00 PM, gdenby said:

You just got lucky. I've been using Designer for over a year now, a minimum of 2 hours a day, sometimes 6, and this is the 1st time I've run into this

That's strange. I've just tried combining two shapes and the same problem. And this is the first time I've tried combining. So two attempts and both fails. I get weird shapes. I'm following the tutorial video here: https://vimeo.com/153090767. I've made the "blood" shapes at the top of the page and then tried to combine the tear drop shape (using the ALT key so it is non-destructive). And it just produces weird shapes. Although after trying several times it now works and I can't now get it to not to work (I'd have liked to have posted it on here)!

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Hi Markeeee,
Currently there's an issue with smart nodes/boolean operations as used in that video that makes the operation to fail. To work around the issue select the all the smart nodes (draw a marquee around all nodes) from the bigger shape with the Node Tool and convert them to Smooth Nodes clicking the respective icon in the Convert section in the context toolbar. You should then be able to perform the boolean operation as described in the tutorial.

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