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Does Affinity Designer have a symmetry tool?


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19 minutes ago, 2989 said:

I had the wrong brush setting. I had the 'selection brush tool' highlighting not the regular brush tool....  I'm a Newbie 😊....

I do that about once a day on average. I keep meaning to rearrange the tools but never get around to it.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Serif doesn’t seem capable of adding (advanced) vector features to Designer, so don’t expect too much.

They call it a stripped-down workhorse.

Well Notepad is too.

  • "The user interface is supposed to work for me - I am not supposed to work for the user interface."
  • Computer-, operating system- and software agnostic; I am a result oriented professional. Look for a fanboy somewhere else.
  • “When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” ― Confucius
  • Not an Affinity user og forum user anymore. The software continued to disappoint and not deliver.
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puh, strange, the workaround with the symbols is already working good, you also can do some patterns with this... its fun, but its all not very handy and you have to plan a lot what you would do ...a real symmetry tool would be like this, just with comfortable settings like define symmetry/mirror axes and how and how often the objects are being copied...dont think this is an impossible task, maybe this is added in some later versions

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  • 4 months later...

Also requesting this feature. Actually searching for a feature like this brought me to AD in the first place, so I'm rather disappointed, that it's only featured in the pixel persona, with AD being primarily a vector tool (imho).

Symbols are a powerful feature, which I really dig, but not a sufficient replacement. 

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...
On 4/22/2019 at 2:12 PM, Aammppaa said:

This 3 way triangular symmetry took me less than 2 minutes to set up (including launching Designer).

I'd never done it before, and have saved to use as a template if I ever need to do it again.

640778209_Affinity3WaySymmetry.gif.a83fa1ca663c2791155c29232732c076.gif

It would be REEEEEEEEEEEALLY nice if you could actually tell me how to achieve this, without just saying 'it took me two minutes to setup'.

What took you two minutes to set up? How did you set it up? What steps exactly did you take to set it up?

I've been trying to figure this out for hours and I honestly want to cry. 

I have honestly NO CLUE how you did this, and every video online is 20 minutes of not-helpful. 

Please tell me the steps you took to do this. Somebody. Anybody?

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1. Using the Pen Tool in ‘Line’ mode, draw a horizontal line.

2. Create a symbol from the selection.

3. Rotate one of the new instances of the symbol by 120°.

4. Rotate the third instance by 240° (or -120°).

5. Edit one of the instances (reshaping, adding new objects, etc).

Affinity Designer Help: Symbols

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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4 hours ago, Alfred said:

1. Using the Pen Tool in ‘Line’ mode, draw a horizontal line.

2. Create a symbol from the selection.

3. Rotate one of the new instances of the symbol by 120°.

4. Rotate the third instance by 240° (or -120°).

5. Edit one of the instances (reshaping, adding new objects, etc).

Affinity Designer Help: Symbols

Instructions unclear, 120 degrees does not compute. 

If I rotate the lines 120 and -120 degrees, they look like the linked picture.

Am I dumb or something?

120 degrees.png

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5 hours ago, Alfred said:

1. Using the Pen Tool in ‘Line’ mode, draw a horizontal line.

2. Create a symbol from the selection.

3. Rotate one of the new instances of the symbol by 120°.

4. Rotate the third instance by 240° (or -120°).

5. Edit one of the instances (reshaping, adding new objects, etc).

Affinity Designer Help: Symbols

Instructions still unclear after further tinkering. Rotated each new symbol instance 60 degrees and -60 degrees, still didn't work as intended. Lol.

 

instructions unclear 2.png

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In Pixel Pest's excellent video note that the orientation of the handles for the lines, they all point in to the centre of the triangle.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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1 hour ago, Jaiess said:

Instructions unclear, 120 degrees does not compute.

Sorry, I thought you could see (as I did) that the animation in @Aammppaa’s post shows the three lines forming an equilateral triangle. As @Old Bruce has highlighted, the rotation paddles all point inwards.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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16 minutes ago, PixelPest said:

 

Okay, this was SUPER helpful. New issue came up though that I can't understand.

When the circles in the attached image have a color in them, the line in the background appears through 2/3rds of the shapes/circles that I created.

Everything else is symmetrical, there is no blend mode on any of the circles.

But, if I move the instance of the symbol down in the layers panel, the line will move with the symbol to just fill in, say the left or right circles if I moved it from the bottom.

I followed the instructions that pixelpest gave to a T. I don't believe I messed up there.

As you can see from the layers panel that I extended on the right, the circles are above the line in the layers panel, on all three symbols.

weird issue 1.png

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14 minutes ago, Jaiess said:

As you can see from the layers panel that I extended on the right, the circles are above the line in the layers panel, on all three symbols.

The circles are above the line in the layer structure, but where are they in relation to each other on the canvas? What do you see if you hide the top instance of the symbol, or if you leave that one visible and hide the other two?

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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18 minutes ago, Alfred said:

The circles are above the line in the layer structure, but where are they in relation to each other on the canvas? What do you see if you hide the top instance of the symbol, or if you leave that one visible and hide the other two?

If I hide one instance of the symbols, they all disappear. If you take one symbol and move it below another in the layers panel, the line issue just moves. Hard to explain without demonstrating.

But apparently stacking issues in AD are known, as said by @PixelPest.

I think my problem has been solved as much as it's going to be solved. I think in order to avoid stacking issues, the lines behind a painted circle would simply need to just meet the circle, rather than layering behind.

Thank you everyone, I really appreciate all the help. I was grumpy and upset earlier because I couldn't figure it out and man does that drive me insane. You all have been wonderful and more responsive than I expected. :')

 

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8 minutes ago, Jaiess said:

I think in order to avoid stacking issues, the lines behind a painted circle would simply need to just meet the circle, rather than layering behind.

That´s what I was trying to show in my last screenshot. ;-) Better draw everything aside to each other.

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