Full Version: Moi + Affinity : Moi for 2D workflows

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Hi Marco,

nice workflow and nice tut's! Here i like to show one addition Mac users may look into
when using MoI and Affinity Designer. In my litte test i created the word Moi in MoI
and then brought it into Art Text 3 to do 3D manipulations, like you can do in Illustrator
or like in Photoshop the well known channel calculations.

The green text can be extruded und beveled and rotated like in MoI and the blue text
are enhancements like ChOps in Photoshop.

With Art Text 3 one can also use it's own MoI 2D graphics and not only fonts.



In order to get MoI pdf output into Art Text 3 i converted the pdf to pdf 1.2 format
with Ghostscript in Terminal. :-)

https://www.belightsoft.com/art-text/

Best regards
Stefan

Image Attachments:
Bildschirmfoto 2017-10-18 um 18.57.39.png 

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Hi Stefan!

@You : "...nice workflow and nice tut's!..."

Thanks a lot! You're welcome :)

@You : "... Here i like to show one addition Mac users..."

Thanks a lot for sharing your experience!

This is the 2nd reason for which I created this thread : sharing personal 2D workflows involving Moi and Affinitiy (Designer and Photo)

The 1st reason is...fun! I like this kind of stuff!

You talked about Art Text 3....yes, I already knew it and some months ago I played with it on a iPad of a friend of mine.
Very nice software that unfortunately doesn't exist for Windows machines.

But...even if here I wish to talk mainly about Moi and Affinity Designer, I want to thank you because you made me remember also
the "daddy" of Affinity Designer, that is Serif DrawPlus!!!

And I still own one license of its latest X8 version that I use sporadically on my laptop.

There you can use a tool called "Instant 3d", a sort of very limited version of "Art Text".

Furthermore, although Affinity Designer is very powerful and with an excellent UI, DrawPlus X8 has some very interesting features that in Affinity are still missing.
For example Tracing bitmap images and other little but very useful stuff.

If you want check these resources :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKPQRwaLTvI
http://www.serif.com/appresources/DPX8/Help/en-gb/help/adding_dimensionality.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTP9XKFVebI&list=PLHomma7lEdeTWabXkIO0XrimXwjwppjTZ


At the end of this message I want to ask you a simple thing that I didn't understand reading your message.
Just out of curiosity...

I see in your picture that you have pasted into Designer the results of Art text elaboration (I suppose).
Ok.
But...did you make some elaboration also in Designer ?

Thanks in advance.

I hope soon to publish some new "quick and dirt" tutorial for Moi and Designer.

Ciao!

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Hi Marco,

I only added Affinity Designer to my toolbox because it is new, looks promising
and it is affordable. I use at work either Illustrator or Coral Draw, when required.

Art Text 3 is a nice addition to missing tools in Designer, hence why i showed it.

For missing auto tracing capabilities in Designer there is also Super Vectorizer,
for Mac users, available. http://www.svgvector.com/vectorize-image-mac.html

I always look for niche 2D/3D tools to avoid otherwise costly software... ;-)

Because i do mostly 3D stuff for my own usage i'm looking also for 1 page
layout solutions, so when needed i can combine those tools.

I'm currently exploring techniques which go from Photoshop to 3D Software,
so currently nothing to show here regarding vector stuff with MoI.

P.S. i could, of course, show some more cool 2D Tools which are working nicely
with MoI, but i don't want to derail your thread.

Best regards
Stefan

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Hi Stefan.

Thanks for the reply!

For what I've read from your posts I guess that you are Mac user :)

I know that many very good GFX software are available for Mac/iOS.

Unfortunately my budget does not allow me to have both systems and because of my job I need a Windows machine,
so currently I have only two machines, one laptop and one more powerful desktop, both with Windows 10 pro.

@You : "...i could, of course, show some more cool 2D Tools which are working nicely with MoI, but i don't want to derail your thread..."

I think that it could be very interesting if you want to start another thread where we could talk about "2D workflows with Moi" in relation to any other kind
of 2D Vector software, both for Windows and mac.

Think about it and let me know!

Anyway, thanks to your previous post, some hours ago I reinstalled Serif DrawPlus X8 also on my desktop and now I can make some interesting
tutorial involving the great duo "Moi + Affinity Designer" with some "contamination" from DrawPlus, because it has some
very interesting tools that actually Designer is missing and that could be very useful for 2D workflow in Moi.

Stay tuned :)

Ciao e grazie! (in English : Bye and thanks!)

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Buongiorno Marco, und Guten Morgen Stefan,

Interesting tips, thanks!

Stefan, regarding bitmap to vector conversion I'm a long-time Vector Magic user (the stand-alone application, not the online version), and I'm quite content with it. But I'll try the free trial version of Super Vectorizer.

Here's a link to Vector Magic: https://vectormagic.com . I have the feeling that its development has stalled for years now. The coder only seems to maintain compatibility with new OS versions.

Another tool I love to use is Photozoom Pro. It enlarges bitmaps in a smart, almost vector-like way. Photozoom Pro has saved my ass quite a few times when clients demanded a super high-res rendering that would have required many hours and would have caused RAM problems.

Here's the link to Photozoom Pro: http://www.benvista.com/photozoompro/

And another tip: XnConvert (free). I use it a lot for quick and easy batch conversions, like mass image size changes to lots of images at once.

XnConvert link: https://www.xnview.com/en/xnconvert/

Have a nice day!

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Post Scriptum:

I've just checked out Super Vectorizer 2, and judging by my tests, Vector Magic's results are better. So if you don't know it yet, and if you need to vectorize images every once in a while, it's definitely worth checking out ( https://vectormagic.com ).

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Hi Metin!

@You : "...Interesting tips, thanks!..."

You're welcome! I really appreciate that this thread it's getting more and more interesting :)

@You : "...Stefan, regarding bitmap to vector conversion..."

Thanks a lot for these suggestion! I didn't know these tools and certainly I will give them a try soon. Thanks.

Meanwhile I'm thinking about some new short but useful (I hope) tutorials involving Moi and Designer.

A sort of some "tips and tricks tuts".

Anyway, just for information, some days ago Serif has released two new beta versions of the upcoming Photo and Designer : 1.6.x...

These are the urls to download :

Designer : https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/47946-affinity-designer-customer-beta-16085/

Photo : https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/47947-affinity-photo-customer-beta-16085/

Have a nice day.

We'll catch up.

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Hi everyone!

I wanted to make a shorter video but...I couldn't :)
Too many things to show!

This time.....GLOBES AND STARS!

This is the video tutorial : http://take.ms/GFX4h

From this :




To this!




This time I've used two custom commands : Randomize and RemoveDuplicates

You can get them here : http://take.ms/H4YwM


Hope you like it.


Ciao!

We'll catch up.

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Cool, thanks Marco! Also for the Affinity beta links!

Have a nice weekend everyone,

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Hi Metin.

You're welcome!

Regarding the new betas of Affinity suite for what I've seen it should be a minor upgrade with a lots of bug fixes an maybe some new features,
but I'm not sure about this point.

I asked to Affinity team about some very important missing feature in Designer and they told me that this is in their roadmap.
Their plan it's to include new substantial features during all 1.X period or when 2.X will be released.

Anyway...I will test this new betas.

P.S. In the Affinity forum they say : "...it is definitely worth noting that files created in Affinity 1.6 may not open in 1.5..."

The say "MAY". For what I've tested so far all files are compatible but anyway it's good to know that could be some incompatibility.

Ciao!

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Hi Marco,

Thanks for the additional info. Maybe I'll wait for the official release after all. Right now I'm too busy enjoying my exploration of 3D Coat anyway. :)

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Hi Metin.

@You : "...Maybe I'll wait for the official release after all..."

I think I'll do so!

Cheers.

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Hi everyone!

I'm back with a new quick and dirt tutorial about Moi with Affinity Designer

This time...."Dot circles vector image"!

Here's the video : http://take.ms/A2zPf



For this tutorial I have used a simple but very useful external tool : Halftoner 1.7
These are the links :
Zip file : http://jasondorie.com/downloads/HalftonerV1.7.zip
Home page : http://jasondorie.com/page_cnc.html



We'll catch up.

Ciao!

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Hi Marco,

nice looking tiger!

Here is one more abstract image from me, done with MoI (lot's of trimming and joining)
and the help of Vector Raster and Art Text 3. Have to explore this workflow a bit more.

Good thing is that with Art Text 3 you can generate really quick poster sized images,
without loosing sharpness etc.

Best regards
Stefan

Image Attachments:
me.jpg  me_abstract.jpg 

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Hi STEFAN.

Thanks a lot for sharing!

Very interesting for Mac users.

If you want to remain within Moi without using any external tool you can use the great Max's "HeightMap" commands!

It generates curves (or point) from an input b&w or greyscale image.

Although the resulting curves needs to be a tweaked a little bit with the "rebuild" command to make them "lighter" ,
before export them to PDF, for importing into Affinity Designer or any other vector graphic software.

You can get the Max's command here : http://take.ms/e2vSN
N.B. In windows you need to run Moi in Administrator mode in order to make HeightMap works.

This is a brief video I made : http://take.ms/fVOE0




Ciao!

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Hi Marco,

Max's Script, in this case, is IMHO not good, because it gives you jaggies!

I use for this task the super cool free Zsurf4 in combination with Photoshop,
which runs also under Wine, for OS X users :-)

Best regards
Stefan

Image Attachments:
ZSURF4.jpg 

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Hi STEFAN.

Oh yeah...ZSurf is very useful and in many cases is the right choice!

I have used it sometimes in the past with good results.

Thanks.

But because here I'm trying always to find "old and new" workflows for Moi and Affinity I'm more interested in playing with curves rather than surfaces.

Anyway, you're right. In many cases ZSurf generates surfaces with a good smoothness, and the Iso curves that I can extract are better than those
generated from "HeightMap" script.

Ciao!

Stay tuned for new stuff involving Moi and Affinity :)

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Hi Marco and all,

just took your tiger drawing into Art Text 3. I really like what one can do with it. :-)



P.S. i added also one Penrose tiling image, done with MoI and Art Text 3, to the MoI Gallery.

Best regards
Stefan

Image Attachments:
tiger.png 

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Hi Stefan!

Very nice!


@You "...your tiger drawing..."

As I said in my original post the tiger is not mine. I get it in Freepik.com
(https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/animals-tribal-tattoo-collection_1168322.htm#term=tiger&page=1&position=5)

Thanks for sharing!

Stay tuned...I hope to upgrade soon my scripts for 2D Workflows. (bug fixing)

Ciao!

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P.S. I only tweaked the tiger a little bit with Affinity Designer to make some cleanup, then I exported it in PNG and then I have used the png for
my 2D Workflow tutorial (original post : http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=8629.39)

Ciao!

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