From the course: Affinity Designer Essential Training

Defining nodes, lines, and shapes - Affinity Designer Tutorial

From the course: Affinity Designer Essential Training

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Defining nodes, lines, and shapes

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- [Instructor] Welcome to the movie on defining nodes, lines, and shapes. In this movie, I'd like to start by showing you what forming tools you'll be using to create vector lines and shapes. I have this little file set up for you and we'll start by talking about the types of tools. We have the pen tool, which is P on your keyboard. We have the pencil tool, which is N on your keyboard. We have the brush tool, which is B on your keyboard. Then you have the shape tools, which is M on your keyboard. You'll cycle through those shapes by hitting M every time. The last one is the special shapes tool. There's no shortcut for that, but if you watch the movie on preference settings and keyboard shortcuts, you'll be able to see how to create a keyboard shortcut for that particular special shape. What you'll notice here is all these special shapes that are down here, the last shape that you use will be represented as the icon for that shape. So if you close this application and you open it back up, this donut tool will be the last tool that shows up there. So if you're looking for a particular shape and you're wondering where that went, that's why. In this section, I'd like to talk about the four types of nodes. If you use the pen tool by hitting P on your keyboard, and you click, you'll create these points. If I zoom in, if you look at these points, you'll notice that there's a square here. That's a sharp node because it's a straight point. So if I hit Shift on my keyboard to constrain, you'll see I keep making sharp points. Now if I click and I drag, I create a smooth Bezier node. You can see here it's made to look like a circle, and you'll see that this is a little circle right here. Now when you switch modes, up at the top here there are four different modes and when you switch modes to the smart mode, you can create these little smart type nodes. What you'll notice is, it's a little circle with a little dot in the middle. So those are the four different types of nodes. Moving on, I'm going to go ahead and delete this object that I've just created, and let's talk about these drawing modes a little bit more. If you scroll in here, and we look at the pen mode, up at the top, there are these four modes. The first one is the pen mode. That is just creating typical Bezier type handles when you click and you drag. The smart mode actually is a mode where you click, and every time you click, Affinity tries to make its best guess at what type of curve you're trying to make. The polygon mode is for making just straight polygons, so there's no curves. So every time that I click and I create a shape, it's only going to be a straight line, a polygon. The last one is the line mode, right up here at the top. If you click on it, line mode. Every time I click, you only need two points to create a line, so every time I click it creates a new line. Those are the four modes that you need to be aware of and I'm going to go ahead and Command-Z all that wonderful stuff that I did right here. And on the last one, I'm going to click the move tool, and i'm going to delete that. I'm just going to talk real quickly about the different types of vector objects. So you have a line, which I showed you in the example before, which you only need two points to create a line. You have paths, which is a series of points, and then you have shapes, any one of these special shapes or shapes that you've created just by using the pen tool, which actually makes a closed shape. I'm going to make sure that this is, as you can see, still in line mode, that's the last tool I made, so when I hit P on my keyboard and I go up to the top and I click and I use the pen tool, I'm creating a shape. Now you should have a good understanding of what's required to create any type of vector line or shape in Affinity Designer.

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