one-click trim sublayers ?

[Xytraz]

Hi,

I don´t know if I just couldn´t find it or if this doesn´t (yet?) exist.

Is there a way to trim shapes in sublayers to the parent layer? I know I can do this by handling the parts as layers and intersect them but this is sort of a bad workflow.

For better understanding please see the screenshot. To the left (1) the original shapes, middle: the shapes put into sublayers (2), right: shapes trimmed by duplicating the gray circle twice for trimming/intersecting them. This does work but requires a lot of steps. Duplicating, contour setting, fill setting, moving into sublayer position. If you do a lot of cartoon shading this is a bit annoying

I´d love it if there would be a function doing this by just clicking the parent layer and then something like "trim sublayers".

I know for designer it doesn´t really matter but if you export your work to other programs it is better for the shading to have the unneccessary parts cut away.

 

greetings, xy

 

[Lee D]

You can right click the layer and select Rasterise and Trim, but you won't be able to adjust or resize without distortion/pixelation. It's worth posting in the Feature Request section of the forum for the developers to see.

[Xytraz]

Well yes, I want this without rasterise ;-)

[Fixx]

Isn't this just basic masking?

[Xytraz]

No, masking doesn´t cut the geometry, it just sort of hides it.

It IS possible achieving that like seen on the screenshot but it is just a bad workflow, I thought there could be an easier way.

Something like the right click "rasterise and trim" just without the "rasterise".

So... it is a feature request now ;-)

[Fixx]

1 hour ago, Xytraz said:

No, masking doesn´t cut the geometry, it just sort of hides it.

Of course. But it is often the required thing (in printed matter, that is).

Basicly it seems you need a simple way to do booleans. Booleans can be tricky and workflowise not very effective. 

I have often need to clean complicated drawings and cut extra paths from outside visible area to keep filesize down (that is for internet documents). There certainly a simple way to cut away extra would help.

Sometimes it is also needed to make clean paths for laser cutters and CAM, which takes different approach to booleans.

[Xytraz]

Why would that make a difference for printing?

Invisible parts don´t get printed anyway, no matter if masked or cut away. Unless Affinity Designer would have a mask with bleed feature of course.

(Now that would be a great thing too.) But currently the contours are put on top anyway. At least that is the way we do it.

 

I agree that often documents for print come from customers in a bad complicated style with many masked parts

and for integrating graphics in PDF and alike trimming would really reduce the filesize.

 

However my wish wasn´t about printing or PDF documents, I just figured out that most cartoon animation programs import masked vectors pretty bad.

So I have to boolean all the shading. That is an annoying thing and I don´t think the boolean operation is too difficult to approach, since technically the trimming

already happened for the display if you mask parts.

[firstdefence]

As far as I can see there is no comparable feature for what you want to achieve in Affinity software. Even if this was possible, any boolean action will also remove fill and stroke properties of the shapes being trimmed, the lowest layer shape will be the adopted fill and stroke!!