2.4 Using the Corner Tool

Hey welcome back to Affinity Designer Quick Start. In this lesson you're going to learn how to round off corners really easily using the corner tool. All right so let's find a shop corner in this design. So just going to zoom right in. And so here's a sharp corner. If we want to around that off we don't have to mess around with Bezier curve handles trying to make sure that everything's symmetrical and uniformly rounded. What you can do instead is select this tool here, the corner tool, which you can also select using C as a keyboard shortcut. Then select the shape that you want to modify, and then hover over the point that you want to round out. You're gonna see a little curve come up. It'll be easier if I show you on this side. You see that little curve comes up at the bottom of the cursor. Now from here if you hold down and drag, you'll see a circle come up Inside that corner, and that circle will determine how rounded off your corners are. Now once you've done that you can come back to it any time and just grab this little red circle here to change the roundness of the corner to anything that you need it to be. Now the actual node itself still stays out in the corner here, you're not moving the location of the node of this corner. So, if you subsequently need to change around the the way that you have nodes set up in this area, you might need to convert this corner that you've created from your corner tool into an editable Bezier curve. And the way that you can do that is with this Bake Corners button. So if we click that, now our node has been converted from a single node, into three nodes. And each one of those nodes is now individually editable, as you would with any other node. So we'll just undo that to bring back our corner. Now you'll notice by default this corner just has a rounded shape. But that's just one of a few options that you have. If you have a look up in the Context menu area, you'll see that there are number of different corner shapes that you can use this tool. So we've got it set to rounded by default. But we can also have a straight corner. We can have a concave corner. And we can have a cut out corner. And in the case of each one of these, it just works in exactly the same way. You're just moving the little circle that gives you the radius of your corner. And then with each one of those different types of corners you still have the option to bake that corner. So that you then have nodes that you can work with individually. In the next lesson we're going to learn about using power duplicate, which is a really amazing feature of Affinity Designer. It's great whenever you need to replicate the same transformation in a duplicated shape over and over. I'll see you there.