Symbols and such... help!!

[VJSHawaii]

First off, apologies in advance.  I am very much new to the Affinity and digital design in general.  I Have played around only enough to get frustrated.   I have been trying to teach myself in order to be able to use clothing design templates provided by custom clothing companies, to create unique designs for my business.

I am blown away by the detail of Affinity.  Daily I am learning more than I ever imagined.  That said, I am assuming there is an option to help me manipulate these templates with greater ease, but I am failing to figure it out.

To be more clear, lets say I have a template that shows a image of a t-shirt.  In that template, each piece of the the t-shirt is broken down by panel.  What I aim to do is edit each panel and have it show the edit on the complete image of the t-shirt.  I discovered the use of Symbols.  Though this would work in some circumstances, where I run into an issue is when the panel does not have the same dimensions when viewed on the complete t-shirt image.  The complete T-shirt image is "3D"... so the panels do not take in to account the contour. 

Is there a way to link a design (or symbol) but have it match an area that differs in dimension?   

Once again, apologies for the lack of terminology.... I hope to become less of a novice soon!

 

[gdenby]

Hi, VJSHawaii,

"Is there a way to link a design (or symbol) but have it match an area that differs in dimension?  "

Symbol objects can have different dimensions. See attached. Everything was initially 2 instances of a symbol comprised of 4 identical red squares. By turning synching off and on, I changed the dimensions, colors, periphery shapes, etc. 

My experience w. symbols is somewhat limited, but I have noted that there are some operations that will cause symbol elements to detach, and they can not be re-synched. Unfortunatelly, I haven't worked out what exactly is happening in those cases.

Looking at the example illu you posted, I suppose that if it is possible to build symbol(s) to update across the seeming 3D objects, it will nevertheless be quite hard to make.

If you want to just change colors, you can create global colors for the panels, and the color fill can update everywhere the colors appear.

[DWright]

If you can get a vector version of the template you can group parts of the template together and apply different fill colours as shown in the rough example below

[VJSHawaii]

gdenby:   Thanks for this info.  I will give it a go!  I was imagining there was a way to correlate a specific node from one "symbol" to match a specific node in a different area, thus allowing the design to "wrap" to a 3D design.  These designs get sent to the clothing manufacturer and the images are intended to be accurate in both areas.

 

DWright:  Cheers!  I did stumble upon this concept.  It is very helpful, provided the areas are all the same color/design.

I included an image (poor image at that) to show what I am intending.  This image does not accomplish what I am trying to do.

 

Thanks!

 

 

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, VJSHawaii said:

I was imagining there was a way to correlate a specific node from one "symbol" to match a specific node in a different area, thus allowing the design to "wrap" to a 3D design. 

As long as syncing is enabled, modifying a node in one instance of a vector symbol will modify it in all other instances, but Affinity Designer is not a 3D app so there is no way to 'map' or project a symbol onto a 3D model of the design.