The new Affinity Designer 1.7 update gives us all a MASSIVE set of new features and improvements that are quite simply impossible to detail all in a single post. So, to keep our heads from exploding into tiny pixels, we are going to focus exclusively on the new isometric drawing tools and break them down as smoothly as possible. The result being, that by the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to create your own organic isometric assets like a pro.
You can get all the assets I created for this tutorial using the download button below.
Tip:Affinity Designer Best in class for creating concept art, print projects, logos, icons, UI designs, mock-ups and more, our powerful design app is already the choice of thousands of professional illustrators, web designers and game developers who love its silky-smooth combination of vector and raster design tools. In this class you will learn about the new features and improvements for the Pen Tool in Affinity Designer from version 1.7 and prevalent in 1.9. This is an add-on class to the previous 'Learn to Use the en Tool in Affinity Designer' where you will learn how the new pen and node tool features will make it even easier than it was drawing anything. The ideal student should have some familiarity with the Pen Tool in Affinity Designer.
You can learn to how to install Assets in Affinity Designer in our guide to installing creative resources.1. Setting up the Isometric Grid
Affinity Designer’s 1.7 update, adds new options to the Grid and Axis Manager Panel. However, for this tutorial, we’re going to focus exclusively on the Isometric Grid settings. You can see a quick overview in this video:
2. Getting to know the NEW Isometric Panel
This is a huge one. This panel is going to basically save you tons of steps by projecting your shapes into isometric planes automatically.
Let’s see how it works:
3. Stepping up the game
So, you’re thinking making simple geometry like isometric buildings and cityscapes is now almost too easy using Affinity Designer? Well, let’s challenge ourselves then. How about crossing (just a little bit) the boundaries between 3D and 2D art?
One style of 3D art that I LOVE is so-called low-poly art. Before Affinity Designer 1.7, creating this type of art was totally feasible but was really time-consuming since you needed to perform more calculations using the Transform Panel.
Let’s make some happy trees.
Having the tools to manipulate shapes more efficiently allows us more creative licenseto draw our shapes.
Tip:
Learn more about mixing vector and raster graphics in this tutorial.As you can see, just by following this simple technique shown in the image above, you can come up with many shapes to combine together and create a nice collection of reusable isometric assets for your projects.
Tip: Avoid using RIGHT angles (90°) when drawing your planes, to make your objects look more organic and stylised.4. Create anything you can imagine.
All of the assets for this tutorial have been made in the same way. The Isometric Panel is both, a time saver and a creativity booster since it helps you to focus more on your artwork creatively and less on the technical aspects.
Remember, you aren’t limited to just 4-sided faces, to add complexity to your shapes, you can draw multiple-side polygons (1). The more sides you add, the less rigid your assets will look when projected (2).
The process of creating the top and bottom planes (3) and then, connecting the dots to draw faces (4), remains the same.
5. Using textures.
To give some character and depth to your isometric objects, you can use the techniques shown in THIS TUTORIAL we made a while ago, explaining in detail how to add raster textures to vector shapes in Affinity Designer.
6. Time to play!
Affinity Designer 1.7 Reviews On Youtube
Once you’ve created some individual isometric assets, you can arrange them and make quick compositions to test what works best for your scene. These new features in Affinity Designer 1.7, will allow you to build more intricate illustrations in half the time.
Visit Frankentoon’s TOON LAB for more Affinity Designer tutorials covering a range of techniques from quick complex masking and painting with textures, to emulating retro graphics and comic book illustration.
This tutorial is aimed at desktop users of Affinity Designer 1.7, though its worth noting that Affinity Designer on iPad has also had isometric features added in our 1.7 update!
Affinity Designer and Photo have received their biggest ever updates, adding market-leading performance improvements, best-ever usability and an extensive list of new features.
The new 1.7 versions of both Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer are available now with a 20% discount ($39.99 desktop, $15.99 iPad) with no subscription. Existing users can download the updated versions free.
Affinity Press Release
Biggest-ever Affinity updates bring unrivalled speed, power and extensive new features
GPU compute acceleration, HDR monitor support and a new memory management system ensure the Affinity suite continues to be at the cutting edge of modern creative software.
Affinity Designer and Photo today receive their biggest ever updates, adding market-leading performance improvements, best-ever usability and an extensive list of new features.
The latest versions underline Serif’s commitment to pushing the limits of performance that users can expect from their hardware. It’s the same approach that made Affinity apps the first fully-featured creative desktop apps to make the leap to iPad.
Today’s v1.7 upgrades mean Mac users can now enjoy end-to-end Metal compute acceleration to take full advantage of the Mac’s discrete GPU, making all raster layer and brush operations up to 10 times faster than ever before. Additionally, the apps now support multiple GPUs—whether internal or with external units connected—multiplying the performance gains further.
Serif Managing Director Ashley Hewson says: “It’s really important that we are leading the way in exploiting the latest technologies available to us and our customers. GPU compute acceleration is something we have worked tirelessly on for the last couple of years as it is certainly the future in achieving phenomenal speeds, even when working on massive, deep-colour projects. We’re pleased to say that for Affinity customers on Mac the future is now here.”
Serif is working on hardware acceleration for its Windows version too, although that will be delivered in a future update. But that hasn’t stopped them achieving big performance increases—today’s updates introduce a rewritten memory management system resulting in 3x or 4x speed improvements across many tasks on Windows machines.
Dial and Pen support for Microsoft Surface devices has also been significantly upgraded, giving users new ways to interact with the apps.
And in a market-first for photo editing and graphic design apps, Affinity Photo and Designer now come with full support for the latest HDR / EDR monitors. This allows photographers to see new levels of the detail captured in RAW files, while designers can push colour intensity in graphics far further than was possible before.
“Using Affinity Photo with an HDR monitor offers a simply stunning experience,” says Ashley Hewson. “It’s amazing the detail and dynamic range the latest SLR cameras capture when shooting in RAW, and Affinity Photo now offers the opportunity to actually see all that depth while editing on an HDR monitor.
“But this isn’t just for high-end photography. As more and more graphic content is being consumed on HDR displays, it will start to become important that designers are using an app which can both work in a 32bit colour space and render the results on an HDR monitor. Affinity Designer is the first professional graphic design application to do both.”
Users of Affinity on iPad aren’t left out either. There are further performance optimisations and a refreshed, compact UI which both gives more real estate for working, but also to allow for the ultimate experience on the new 7.9-inch screen iPad mini.
“The new iPad mini is an incredible device, especially now it supports Apple Pencil,” says Ashley Hewson. “It’s pretty cool that you can work on high-end photo compositions or full design projects with thousands of objects on such a small device”
As well as these device specific improvements, there are plenty of new features and improvements which have been added—all of them available on the Mac, Windows and iPad versions from today.
Affinity Photo
· Much improved RAW processing engine offering significantly faster loading of files, a new demosaicing algorithm, more effective noise reduction, hot pixel removal and wide colour space development.
· Rewritten brush engine adding all-new multi-brushes, a symmetry mode (up to 32-way) and on-the-fly nozzle rotation with shortcut keys.
· Batch processing is improved, a new assets panel is available for quick drag and drop of commonly used elements, and the layers panel has had a complete overhaul.
Affinity Designer 1.7.0.367 Crack
Affinity Designer
· New isometric controls allowing you to work directly on any isometric plane - or fit existing elements to a plane with a single click.
· Vector shapes can now possess an unlimited number of strokes and fills, with complete freedom to interleave different attributes and control how they are blended together. Arrowheads have been added to the stroke panel too.
· Improvements to almost all vector tools, including lasso selection of modes, the pencil tool adding a sculpt mode, a new point transform tool as well as huge improvements to guides, grids and snapping.
“This update isn’t only about the big new features and performance gains—we’ve also made literally thousands of little tweaks and improvements to both apps based on all the feedback we get from our customers every day. It’s a lot of these little enhancements which add up to mean both Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer are more productive than ever before.”
The new 1.7 versions of both Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer are available now with a 20% discount ($39.99 desktop, $15.99 iPad) with no subscription. Existing users can download the updated versions free.
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