Hello, this is Cristi and this is a short tutorial to show you how you can slice shapes
in Affinity Designer. This would be an operation that maybe you'd expect to be easy to do.
It's very easy to do in other software, like Illustrator and maybe Xara Designer and others,
but not so easy in Affinity Designer. It's missing a slice mode for shapes.
I'm going to illustrate this by trying to slice a square into two triangles. I'm going to use
the rectangle tool here, start drawing and hold down the SHIFT key to make it a perfect square.
Let me just remove the fill for now and I'm going to add a thicker stroke,
just so we see what's happening here. So this is my square and what I want to do is
actually, I want to divide it into two halves. Maybe have two triangles resulting from this.
It's very easy to illustrate what I want to do. For example,
using the pen tool I'm going to just draw a line like this and using the node tool
I'm going to put that in the corner just like that. It doesn't have to be exact.
You would think that maybe selecting these two things, these two objects,
using one of these combine operations would give you what you want. But pressing maybe, Divide,
doesn't actually do it, it just cuts the outside part here, and it doesn't really do what I want.
So let me just undo this for a minute. The way to do this is actually,
you want to separate the dots. So depending on the complexity of your object, this may be
more or less time-consuming, but I'm just going to show you with this one, so using the Node tool,
press A, you want to isolate this corner and this corner and keep half and half.
First of all, right click on your object and select Convert to Curves. This changes it into a
node object like this, so what I'm going to do is just click on this node here,
and what I want to do is break the object here and break the object here, and then close
each of the resulting shapes on its own. So clicking on this node here,
you have this bar here at the top and one of the actions is Break Curve. So the operation is
going to happen on the dots or the node you have selected. If you want to do it on both at once,
you can select both and do it but if not, just do the one like this, and click Break Curve.
OK. Click on the other one here, the node opposite, Break Curve again and
just to illustrate, I'm going to use the selection tool to put these apart now,
and look. This is one, and this is the other. So I have two resulting shapes from one shape,
because I broke the objects in those nodes. All I have to do now is go to each one of them,
again back to the node tool, and use this other action Close Curve. And this is going
to unite both these nodes, like that. And do the same on the other one,
and there you have it. These are now two closed shapes
I can give them a different colour if I want, so that you see they are actually shapes.
Here you go, you can change the stroke and everything else.
So this is very quick tip on how to slice objects by breaking the curve, closing it again.
Of course, if they're more complex you need to make sure you have the nodes in the right places,
you can easily add the nodes and close them again, so this is one way to separate
objects into separate curves. This is the way you can do it in Affinity.
If you have another easier way to do this I would be very interested
to find out, leave it in the comments. If not, I hope this has been useful to you,
thank you for watching and I hope you subscribe to my channel. See you next time!