I’m in the process of building a watch face made entirely of shape layers.
Now after some hours of eye-bleeding I got a “working” minute hand. As one can see in the inspector I had to overlay the not-so-seamless transitions between the separate shape layers with filles circles lol.
I guess this has already been done countless times, but I couldn’t find an example just like mine. How would YOU do this?
I would use one of the many hands available here in the community, or, make one in a drawing app like Paint or similar. Making a hand from facer shape layers is quite impressive well done!
Heh, thanks for the kind words! Thing is, I really wanted to go this way because I have the feeling that hands made in a gfx app (in my case Adobe stuff) look different than made out of “materials on board” 
Maybe I’m just being stubborn.
But layers are battery killers, are they not?
This is a common topic here - I’m not sure these days with improved batteries that it is such a problem but 100’s of layers might slow things down. A hand drawn in a art package is only one layer…but if you are doing this as an exercise in Facer, like I said - well done!
Shapes are a pain because they vary in the rotation anchor. Nice on the sheer determination to get all that working though.
Let me see if I can run up a quick font one. See if that tickles you?
Edit:
I think we are finding out that a lot of Cos Sin orbiting stuff might be a drain on the processor . I have made stuff in Creator and taken the background out with a web background remover . This might have changed recently . Facer is continually trying to move away from one of its Major Criticisms which is Power Drain . Each Companion update as far as I can see uses less power .
You are not alone. We had kind of challenge back then. I admit, I dont remember rounded hands
Stock Facer source community faces - Show Your Style! - FACER Community
It seems this one lets you remove a White background . Possibly black you will have to test it . You lose some resolution unless you Pay . I would say 500x500 is fine for what we are doing .
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I use paint.net to do that kind of background removal from shapes designed in Facer creator all the time. It’s very good at it once you get the hang of the correct tolerance.
Often it is easier to use the default black background and remove that. You can do your work and then shrink from the exported 960x to 640 to further minimise glitches.
Online I use https://ezgif.com/ but shall also look at your suggestion to compare.
FONTS! Hah! I devised the circle formula stuff with a test face with rotating text, but the idea to make a hand out of a font never came up in my head. Brilliant, thx! Gotta look into this.
It’s not just the X/Y cos/sin.
I revisited my two tone faces recently to try and resolve a glitch introduced by the reverse fill on arcs. It runs worse on my new watch than it did 2 years ago even though smooth in creator. The motion is completely ticky on the watch:
I am wondering if, in an effort to reduce drain they have made the processing single thread so it only processes one movement at a time on certain calculations. I noticed it when trying a rolling number effect at minute tick over. 2 half second calculations were in place but the second one was never seen, I assume because it was not processed until the first had finished and the timeslot was gone.
That’s pretty cool effect how the face color inverts.
I distilled this shape hand thing and two other brainburners of mine into a test face, and I will watch battery consumption through a full discharge cycle. I will compare this with a non-facer face and report back in a few days.
I’m a bit obessed with this “bold” or “comic-y” or what-else-shall-I-call-it style, so I really want this to work, but it’s no apocalypse if it’s simply not feasible. Brain exercise - never had any technical background, so it’s good to learn something new from time to time
Most of mine start that way. I keep the drafts as templates I can keep improving as I learn and pull into something that fits.
Will have to have a look at yours. You have been investigating some interesting ideas.
@mrscolumbo . I thinl your comik-y style is a Good Idea. A thin sweep hand top of your Face is a good tets of Stressing the Processor . Use creator to make your rssources and another app to Remove the Background . As Rob mentioned it is a Good Idea to get into something like Paint.net . It is definatly one of the Better ones .
I am confused about one thing. * (pi) in the X/Y.
I’ve never used it and the ones I use (160+(10*cos(rad(#DWFKS#-90)))) seem to work the same. What does it do?
Me To . For me if it works it works . It is how I sync it to the Real time clock . It is about the difference between Radians and Degrees . I was never that good at maths . If I find somethinng that works I put it in my bits box .
Ah, yes. I spotted the addition, but not the omission. That makes perfect sense. I don’t fully understand the maths either but at least now I know I am not missing anything magical, just seeing 2 different ways of calculating the same result and can ignore the gubbins and focus on the key numbers/tags.
Good spot, cheers.
Ah, I see there’s a radian expression in facer well, I can get rid of pi now, heh.
And you claim not to be technical ;-p
