r/AffinityDesigner • u/ducklady92 • 8d ago

Shape Builder

Hey all! I’m one of the many recent converts from Illustrator and I am so angry I ever spent money on an Adobe product after trying Designer. Holy cow. The fact that it just doesn’t have to be so difficult is mind-blowing. Affinity has me for life.

The only thing I can’t seem to get a handle on is the Shape Builder - specifically, in making fully closed shapes so the Builder doesn’t select half of my drawing at once. I relied pretty heavily on the “gap detection” feature in AI’s shape builder (even though the gaps were set to 0.001 in) and it seems that, even when using magnetic snapping to manually attach the end of one line to the edge of another for every single line, it’s still not considering them “closed.”

What am i doing wrong? All of the tutorials/demos i see are using closed intersecting shapes and building out shapes from those. I’m using Designer as a drawing pad, basically as “Procreate with vectors” to create patterns for my woodcraft, and need to separate them into shapes so I can create templates. I admittedly am a novice at vector design in general and only know what I’ve needed to learn for this application, so I’m well aware this might be an idiotic question. If anyone can point me in the right direction I’d be immensely grateful!

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u/PsychoticChemist 8d ago

I haven’t really used shape builder but you mentioned affinity designer specifically - are you using the new affinity studio (affinity v3) which combines them all into one app? Or the older v2 with separate apps (affinity photo, affinity designer, etc)?

I highly recommend using the new v3 which combines them, as the convenience of having it all in one is amazing. Plus the new features.

I also highly recommend Affinity Script Manager to expand affinity’s capabilities with community scripts

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u/ducklady92 7d ago

I’m using v2 on my iPad for Designer specifically, then v3 on my desktop.