Vector/pattern fill

[Comet]

In an ideal world there would be symbol swatches included for things like hatching of various types (lines, wavy lines etc), dots of various densities, soil-type symbols, and so on.

Basically all the things that you would normally fill areas with for plans and drawings of various types. You shouldn't need to create these from scratch in any illustration-type application.

This is basic functionality in my view and it is tragic that it is missing.

[iMiek]

On 2/27/2021 at 1:41 AM, Lensman888 said:

+1 for ANY sort of Pattern fill in DESIGNER, whether vector or pixel. The fact that you now have this option in PHOTO but not DESIGNER is really irksome. 

+1 for pattern in Designer

[Son of Shad]

+1 for vector fills please!

[Slashee the Cow]

On 3/21/2019 at 6:52 PM, jc4d said:

Hi all,

I'm considering buying Designer but one thing that I can't find is if there is a way to fill an object using vector or patterns. I only find gradients and bitmap.
I know we can duplicate an object to create hand made pattern but I can't then edit the repetitions like if is a bitmap fill.

Cheers,
Juan

+1 from me!

[FunnyBunny]

+1 for vector pattern tool. Please make it dynamic so you can edit the colors of the pattern.

[rkraynor]

This feature is probably the only thing holding my classmates studying architecture from jumping ship from Illustrator – we use hatches in drawings and renderings, and I can say with certainty that your market for undergraduate and masters of architecture students (and professionals) would increase tenfold!

[Comet]

12 hours ago, rkraynor said:

This feature is probably the only thing holding my classmates studying architecture from jumping ship from Illustrator – we use hatches in drawings and renderings, and I can say with certainty that your market for undergraduate and masters of architecture students (and professionals) would increase tenfold!

Exactly - it is a crying shame that this fundamental capability is missing from this otherwise excellent product.

[ra.skill]

@Comet@rkraynor do not fret!
This feature will come in good time. 

[Comet]

28 minutes ago, ra.skill said:

@Comet@rkraynor do not fret!
This feature will come in good time. 

How so sure?

You will see that this thread has been running for nearly two years now without any sign this fundamental feature is ever going to appear.

[ra.skill]

14 hours ago, Comet said:

How so sure?

You will see that this thread has been running for nearly two years now without any sign this fundamental feature is ever going to appear.

Honestly I have no idea that this will ever come... it’s a pretty important feature for me too... but I have faith Affinity will be bringing this soon... ish 😂 Photo now has a pattern tool so can’t be too far from appearing in Designer. 

[dominik]

18 hours ago, Comet said:

How so sure?

If you care to read this thread you will discover that the basic functionality is already there ... with APub's data merge feature. You can use its layout tool to create vector pattern fills right now.

Cheers,
d.

[Lensman888]

2 hours ago, dominik said:

If you care to read this thread you will discover that the basic functionality is already there ... with APub's data merge feature. You can use its layout tool to create vector pattern fills right now.

Cheers,
d.

I don't own Affinity Publisher. I have Affinity Designer on the iPad. This is a sorely needed feature. There are other programmes on my PC that will allow this, but I would very much like to be able to do this using ONE app on the iPad.

[Comet]

5 hours ago, dominik said:

If you care to read this thread you will discover that the basic functionality is already there ... with APub's data merge feature. You can use its layout tool to create vector pattern fills right now.

Cheers,
d.

Then why isn't the functionality built directly into Affinity Designer, if the code is already written?

There's no way that people are going to switch backwards and forwards between Affinity Publisher and Affinity Designer to do something that should be a basic built-in function within Affinity Designer. Get real!

[walt.farrell]

9 minutes ago, Comet said:

There's no way that people are going to switch backwards and forwards between Affinity Publisher and Affinity Designer to do something that should be a basic built-in function within Affinity Designer. Get real!

That's why Affinity provides the File > Edit in ... menu items: to allow easy switching between the applications for cases where one application has a tool you need that your current application doesn't have.

But specifically for Publisher and Designer, you can do most Designer functions using the Designer Persona of Publisher (if you own both applications). So there's no switching backward/forward. You just work in Publisher and click on the Persona you need.

[dominik]

3 hours ago, Comet said:

Then why isn't the functionality built directly into Affinity Designer, if the code is already written?

The question was how we can be sure that a vector pattern fill will eventually be part of Affinity Designer. My answer is that part of the functionality is already there and this can make us sure that we will see this at some point in the future.

There must be reasons why it was not built into AD yet. And I do not know why this is the case.

It's a fair point that APub is not available on the iPad (as @Lensman888 mentions above). But for that there are techniques that have been demonstrated already until we see a true vector pattern fill in AD.

Cheers,
d.

[fde101]

17 hours ago, dominik said:

part of the functionality is already there

Sort of.

I would expect that Designer will eventually have a vector pattern feature, but most likely in the form of something that is specifically designed for the purpose, rather than the currently suggested twisting of a largely unrelated feature that happens to accomplish incidentally a reasonable subset of what is being asked for.

[ra.skill]

Haha :-) 

I'm with ya @fde101

Whilst the "data merge" thing is a good work around for the time being it's very lacking in features because it's not specifically for pattern design purposes.

As I said early i'm sure some kind of pattern feature can't be far away... if Publisher has data merge and Photo has a pattern tool surely Designer can soon expect something.

[dominik]

6 hours ago, fde101 said:

Sort of.

I agree. I refer to the fact that the data merge layout tool is capable of immediate (= very responsive) repetition of vector objects that are placed in a cell. That part of the technology is already there.

I assume a true vector pattern fill capability can be built around that with special functions like multiple axis and different shapes from only rectangles.

At the moment the data merge layout tool is only a workaround. But it does it pretty good for a limited amount of use cases.

d.

[FunnyBunny]

If the delay is because they want to put in a good work with dynamic editing and whatnot it is better than them releasing a simple hack job like CorelDraw non-dynamic stuff.

 

(with dynamic I mean ability to edit/recolor the content.. In CDR you are stilll, in 2021, unable to do it. haha)

[Comet]

3 hours ago, FunnyBunny said:

If the delay is because they want to put in a good work with dynamic editing and whatnot it is better than them releasing a simple hack job like CorelDraw non-dynamic stuff.

 

(with dynamic I mean ability to edit/recolor the content.. In CDR you are stilll, in 2021, unable to do it. haha)

Maybe, but this is such a fundamental feature for so many use-cases that I am shocked it is still not in the product after such a long time. For many people, like me, it is the one thing which is holding back from adopting the product.

I tried creating a box in Illustrator and filling with a simple vector fill of diagonal lines and then imported the file into AD. It imported the file with the box but it is filled with a dithered version of the hatching, which you can't edit.

Incidentally when dragging this box around the screen there was a lot of tearing, whereas in Illustrator it is seamless. Looking into this further I discovered that when dragging it around in Illustrator CPU use never goes over 70%, whereas in AD it goes up to over 400% (iMac 27, Big Sur, 3.7GHz Core i5 with Radeon Pro 580GX) .

I am surprised to think that Illustrator has better and more efficient coding in this area but that is what I see. I also tried filling the box with a simple shade of grey with exactly the same result. This is pretty much the same whether the app is set to use Metal or OpenGL.

[Alfred]

8 minutes ago, Comet said:

I tried creating a box in Illustrator and filling with a simple vector fill of diagonal lines and then imported the file into AD. It imported the file with the box but it is filled with a dithered version of the hatching, which you can't edit.

You can create a vector fill of diagonal lines directly within AD with the aid of the ‘Power Duplicate’ feature, and then you can clip it to the shape you want to fill, but it isn’t as easily created or as easily adjustable as one would expect from a proper Vector Fill Tool.

[David.P]

While we wait for Affinity to finally introduce a vector pattern fill feature, attached are a few hatches that can be used to fill shapes or enclosed areas, particularly using Inkscape.

These are true tiled hatches, consisting of one line segment and it's bounding rectangle only, which then are tiled to fill any area.

Sadly, Affinity Designer doesn't even seem to support such (externally created) vector fill patterns.  

The issue of seamless vector fills seems to be a bit tricky, as it also has been planned for years in the SVG standard, but still hasn't been implemented.

Inkscape Vector Crosshatch Template.svg

[David.P]

Interestingly, one can create seamless vector fills very well in PowerPoint of all things, see attachment.

Unfortunately however, these are rasterized with some coarse 200dpi when printed or exported to PDF.

PowerPoint Shape with WMF Vector Fill.zip

[FunnyBunny]

I have yet to use AD a lot, so I am not sure how it works there. In CorelDraw it is not working any good so what I do there is use its Powerclip feature to fill the content with manually tiled objects of size. I do that rather than do pattern, and then pattern fill because of the poor adjustability of the latter that I simply do the powerclip route as it takes same/similar effort and at least let me adjust the content.

Powerclip is when you turn one object into a container of kind, and the content can be wider than the object but the excess isn't shown.

It isn't a replacement to a well made vector fill of course.

[D.E. Main]

Can Affinity tell us if they really are working on a vector fill or not?  A post in 2014 suggests that it was in the mix.  (See below.)  That's 7 years ago.  Is it any closer, or should we plan to count on other resources/tools?

> On 10/9/2014 at 1:33 PM, TonyB said:

>  We will add a vector fill tool but we want to do it right so it might take a while.