3.1 Transforming Objects

Hi, welcome back to Affinity Designer Quick Start. In this lesson we're going to go through how you can transform shapes. And there are two ways that you can transform shapes in Affinity Designer. One is on the canvas, using tools that will come up when you hover your mouse around the shape. And the other is using the transform panel. So if you've worked with other graphics applications then a lot of this is gonna be pretty familiar. But it's worth going over because there are a couple of things that you might miss if you're not sure exactly where to go to use them. All right, we'll just start by drawing out a square, onto our canvas. And over here in our transform panel, you can see that we have immediately got some information coming up about our shape. So we're able to use these fields here to start transforming our shape. So, for example, let's say we want to make sure that this is perfectly square. We could jump in here and change these values. And we could set the position that our shape will be at. And you can also work with rotation. You can see there, we are rotating the shape around. We can change the point of origin for that rotation. And this can be very handy for making precise rotations when you know exactly how much of a turn you want to have in your shape. Now in the square here you can set the skew of the shape. So we can skew to the left or to the right. As something that might not be obvious at first, is what to do if you want to skew your shape in two directions. You might come down here and skew your shape a little bit. Let's say we're just skew it by 14 degrees. But what happens if you also want to skew it vertically? Now the transform panel will only give you a horizontal skew. So if you want to skew vertically, then you'll need to come in here and look for these little arrows here. Now it can be a little finicky to make the skew tool come up. So you just need to very finely come into the sides of the shape until you see these two arrows appear. And then you can skew vertically, as well as horizontally. So on top of the ability to skew, you also have the ability to rotate. If you hover your mouse around any of the corners. So that's free rotation. But if you hold down Shift, you can also lock the rotation into set increments. Now if you position your mouse directly over any of these transformation nodes here, you'll have the ability to scale. So there you've got free movement in your scaling and once again, if you hold down Shift, you'll lock in the movement of that scaling. You also have vertical scaling and horizontal scaling. So that is the essentials that you need to know for transforming objects in Affinity Designer. In the next video you're gonna learn how to set up your Affinity Designer and display so that you actually have a split screen, where you can see your design in two different modes at once. And you have a slider down the middle that allows you to scrub in between these two different types of views. I'll see you there.