2.6 Real-Time Embedded Object Editing

Welcome back to Affinity Designer Quickstart. In this lesson, we're going to learn how to do real time editing of embedded objects. Now, you can actually embed any type of image that you want into an Affinity Designer file. So you can drop in JPEGs or PNGs or anything you want. But, if you drop in an Affinity Designer file as an embedded object, you can then do real time editing to that embedded object. And you'll see those edits update in your design, in every place that you have embedded it. Let's have a look at an example. We have two Affinity Designer a files here. The first one, you're already looking at, and it's a simple isometric cube. And the second one, is a flat image that we're going to embed into our first document and turn it into the sides of our cube. Right, so we head back to the first image. And then we're going to use this tool here, the Place Image tool, to embed our flat crate side. And then we can just place the image in. And now we can manipulate, it to line it up with our box shape. Now I'm just gonna speed this up so you don't have to watch through as I manipulate each one of these sides. All right, so now we have our three instances of our embedded object. One on each side of our isometric cube. But what happens if we decide that we wanna change the way that the sides of these cubes look? Or what we can do is double-click any one of these embedded objects. Now we can edit right here and any changes that we make are going to show up in all the embedded instances. Now, I'm just going to switch into separated window mode so you can see this a little bit more clearly. All right, so that is our original crate side. And here is the embedded version. So we'll just move this over. All right, so now let's say we want to change the color of the innermost box, make it a different shade. So there you can see, as we're changing the shade here, you're seeing the effect in real time in our main document. Now the thing to be aware of is the real time editing that you're doing is not going to affect your original document. When you embedded that original document into your design, you created a duplicate. And it's the duplicate that you're editing here. So, if you were to go back to the design that you originally created, you can see that nothing has changed there. The only thing that has changed is the embedded version, and every instance of that embedded object in your design. So just to recap, you embed any of your other Affinity Designer files into your design using this little tool here. The Place Image Tool and then to start doing real time editing just double-click on any of the instances of that embedded object. In the next video, you're gonna learn about one of the coolest features of Affinity Designer, and that is the ability to paint in brush strokes that look like raster based brush strokes but are actually vectors. I'll see you there.