Ideas for the future of the shape builder tool

[amoore]

ah well.... there are three [at least] distinct camps - the 'technical' drawing types that need real point-to-point accuracy, and the website builders, and the freehanders... a voice over my shoulder says I left out the 'photo-manipulators'

Don't forget the 'clipart-manipulator' camp. (I'm sure I'm not alone.)

[handrawn]

a cousin of the photo-manipulators I'm thinking

[boy am I glad I said 'at least', all sorts of uses for this program ... ]

[mwenz]

If you do not desire to alter the original shape--e.g., painting in an already non-closed area drawn--and you desire to paint the fill, add a layer below the object layer. Paint on it.

Take care, Mike

[Squeaky]

For non destructive you can use Xaras Join function or Clipview, They are are both pretty vital in my work flow in the correct circumstances. The Shape builder is something else entirely and maybe not something that is useful to your work. It is very useful to me though. That is the beauty of XDP. It's a real swiss army knife and does many things very well indeed :-)

[Nostaw]

I guess you're right it's designed for a whole different purpose, for quck and simple real time vector based drawing. The reason I'm suggesting a more non destructive approach is the 'messy' result it creates.

[MarcT]

In the same idea of the eraser and shape builder, a shape tweaker/deformer would be very nice, with softedge faloff.

Marc

[handrawn]

its not a messy result if you look at it in terms of painting

look if you use a raster painting program likely you don't worry too much about this destructive hangup - for a start it can make you complacent or even lazy - and anyway there is always CTRL+Z, if you need to go back any further than a couple of these maybe you didn't think things out well enough in the first place

I'm not knocking your point of view - I understand it, but what you call 'messy' I call 'organic'

I can't see how it could be made non-destructive any more than the shape [editor] tool could be... they both do the same job in different ways - and the fact that they can both be used on shapes generated by the other is good implementation ...

[handrawn]

shape tweaker - you mean like the liquid color deformation filter in live effects, except vector... yes, that would be cool

[MarcT]

Yeah, a bit like the warp tool in illustrator but better!

It would be nice to see a falloff like those 3d programs, points close to the center would be more affected, etc..

Marc

[Nostaw]

Yeah, a bit like the warp tool in illustrator but better!

It would be nice to see a falloff like those 3d programs, points close to the center would be more affected, etc..

Marc

I suggested cluster manipulations to transform selected points of a shape (scale, rotate, alignment of points) around a center that can be freely moved many years ago. There shouldn't be a difference transforming a shape or selected points of a shape. Together with falloff to 'smear' parts of a shape would be very useful. It's never gonna happen