Help with Illustrator?

Anyone?

Personally I think the manual for this program leaves an awful lot to be desired.

Nothing really addressed what I wanted to do.

[Kai]

I think Kakaze can help you here...
(btw moving this to the 2D Program Q&A )

I dont know alot about Illustrator,but maybe I can help.

Illustrator Guru at your service.


What can I do for ya?

try this one:

http://xara.com/products/xarax/

It's 100 times more stable and 10 times faster, and 1/4 the price

Originally posted by Kakaze
Illustrator Guru at your service.

What can I do for ya?

Okay.

I just purchased this "fairly" recently. When in doubt RTFM is what I always say...

Anyway I was looking for a way to use Illustrator to create Aztec patterns. Read manual twice, nothign that even remotely looked like tools I was familiar with in Photoshop.

Before I was making a flat grid in PS and used the polar coordinates plugin to create the proper effect.

Illustrator has thrown me for a bit of a loop.

could you post some of the Aztec patterns so I can better understand what you are talking about.

Okay, first thing you have to remember, Illustrator is a COMPLETELY different way of looking at drawing than Photoshop.

Photoshop is more like traditional art where you can do pretty much anything, but with Illustrator you have to think differently. Which is why it looks completely different than Photoshop (though everything that can be standardised is.)

As far as making the Aztec, I've never done it myself, but I know that you have to actually make it round instead of square to round. SFA had a tutorial for it, and thankfully, someone copied it and put it back up on the web.

Try it and see, and let me know if you have any other questions

http://hippiesatemysangies.whoadude....scovery/aztec/


Oh, and Kaybee...yeah, um, Xara? :shakes head:

I have a question that may help. Is there any way to repeatedly rotate an objext around a fixed point? I know you can fix a rotation pint before you rotate, but you have to reset that rotation poit before each rotation. And you can easily be off by a small amount.

Hey Tommy, if you use the Transform Again command I believe it will use the exact same parameters as the previous transformation that was applied, including center point, angle, copy settings, etc. Try it, I'm not positive, but I think it will work.

Dark Overlord, like Kakaze said you've gotta learn to think a little differently when using Illustrator, but keep at it and eventually it'll just click. Some tips that should help though:

Smart Guides are your friend, keep playing with them and get used to how they work and how to set them up properly for what you want to do, they will take a lot of the work out of any technical illustration if used properly.

Pathfinder is indsipensible, it helps if you take a modeling mindset into Illustrator, think of the pathfinder actions as booleans and use them accordingly.

Try that tutorial, between the pen tool, the ellipse tool, smart guides and pathfinder you shouldn't have to use much else to create an aztec.

:edit: Got your post in while I was futzing with Illustrator, bah. :p This is obviously in response to Toms post, can't be arsed to put a quote in right now. And I have to say...ugh, I hate smart guides. Though I don't do anything technical, so I don't know how helpful they are, but I know with things that don't have to be precise they're bloody annoying.

Not that I know.

I've never needed to do it before.

I just went and looked through the help file and played around with it a bit and couldn't do it. Once you change the origin point and then deselect the object it reverts back to the centre when you select it again.

I'll ask on the adobe support forums, since I'm curious about this now myself.

One of the really cool things about working with splines in a program like max is that you can create helper points. They don't render, but you can tell max to use that point as the center of your transformation. And to conitnue using it as the center until you choose another, or none.

I mean if you have to do it, you can create an aztec pattern in a 3d program, render it, then use it for a saucer texture. If you really had no better way.

Got a reply from the Illustrator Forums...others might reply later, but this is what I got so far.

Not exactly, but there are some workarounds to make it easier.

Method 1: Group your object with a single anchor point (one click with the pen tool) located at the place you want to use as a rotation origin. This will give you someplace to snap to when you are setting the rotation origin with the Rotate tool. (It won't help with the other rotation methods that don't let you set the origin, though.)

Method 2: Group your object with an unpainted circle centered on your desired origin, and big enough to entirely enclose the regular object. Select that group instead of just the object. The transformation methods that use the object center as the default origin will now rotate the group as a whole around the group's center, which is the same as the circle's center.

Method 2 is more convenient since it works with more of the ways to do rotations, but if you are doing Copy rotations, it will leave you with a bunch of unpainted circles in your file.

After you are done with the rotations and don't expect to need your origin-altering tricks anymore, you can use Object>Path>Clean Up.. to delete stray points and/or unpainted objects.

ah... that could work.

The second idea is really good. i do that in photoshop.


btw I tried exporting from 3dmax to illustrator. It works fine except the scaling is really off. I made to rough hexagons in max than exported the splines to illustrator. Opoened it up fine in illustrator except it was so big all I could seee when I opened it up was one diagonal liine going across the page. it was that big. But a select all and typing in the resize amount worked fine.

Ugh.

I get the feeling this going to be a very long painful process.

Illustrator is very intimidating when you first try it.

I HATED it with a passion when I first started using it. Now it's my favourite programme to use.

hmmmm.....

I hate having to basically put the brakes on everything I am doing to learn something new.

I guess I'll take it as I go. When I bought it, I thought it would bear some similarities to Photoshop, which was clearly an error on my part.

Ah well. I'll dig around and crawl along.

Illustrator is fun, you just have to be able to wrap your mind around how it works.

Can do some pretty cool shazbot with it.

Originally posted by Kakaze
Illustrator is very intimidating when you first try it.

I HATED it with a passion when I first started using it. Now it's my favourite programme to use.

LOL!! I know the feelings! Man it took me a lot to go from PSP to this. I swore I hated this program for the first two weeks I used it and now I use it daily.

Question
However, I am having a problem exporting the image from Illustrator to Photoshop. It seems to cut part of the image out of the canvas.

Can anyone tell me how to get around this?

Is this what you're trying to do?





I've been using this app professionally since 1988. Maybe I can't help point you in the right drection. I'll tell you this though, forget everything you've learned about Photoshop. it won't do anything but confuse you when you try to use Illustrator.

Basically, uh, yup.

Right on the nose there Nova.

Originally posted by Zanith


LOL!! I know the feelings! Man it took me a lot to go from PSP to this. I swore I hated this program for the first two weeks I used it and now I use it daily.

Question
However, I am having a problem exporting the image from Illustrator to Photoshop. It seems to cut part of the image out of the canvas.

Can anyone tell me how to get around this?

If you have any crop marks listed it will cut your image right at them when you export, but otherwise, if you export something it will send the whole kit and caboodle. What you can try is making a box and centering it on your image, then expand the box bigger than your image. Give the box a hairline stroke, and no fill, then export. It will take everything to the border of the box for you.

To avoid clipping when I export, I make a layer in the baclground with a white borderless box fitting the dimensions of my document area.

Originally posted by Dark Overlord
Basically, uh, yup.

Right on the nose there Nova.

Well, then ask your questions.

Originally posted by Nova Class
Well, then ask your questions.

See that is my problem....

I have read the manual 3 or 4 times from front to back. I have toyed around various methods to do exactly as your picture shows,

but there is just nothing there that would indicate where to start.

So far I have yet to purchase any additional materials like Classroom in a book, or Illustrator Bible.

I also felt the Photoshop manual kind of sucked beyond "this is where the menus are" and I did most of my learning from other books.

I don't have a clue what to ask without resorting to "where do I start"?

I got one!

This isn't a biggie.

When you have to rotate a slice, many times to copy it, do you use that large encompassing circle trick?

Also I noticed in your lower sample all the little tiles had a different shade as if a noise filter was applied to them. How did you do that? I can't imagine you coloring each square by hand.

Okay basically what I did was this:

After putzing with the sample files and stuff, I tried to grid out a saucer.

Drawing circles out using the guides was going incredbly slowly, as was trying to draw lines to make the radial details.

Now this was on the "big" detail areas. how the heck do I make the box detail?

It SEEMS like I would have to just sit here and very metculously draw out circles, then tons of radial lines, and then fill everything in one box at a time by hand????

Fill out one section of the pie, select just that part of it, then duplicate it for all the other sections of the pie, just rotating them into position.

What I do is create one vertical radial line. I duplicated the radial line by alt-clicking with the rotate tool directly in the center of where I want to rotate and typing in the degree value I want, then chose COPY. I get a copy rotated exactly right. Then CNTL-D until they duplicate all the way around.

I then create a circle centered on that and ALT-SHIFT-Drag out new circles until I have them in the positions I want. This key combo copies and keeps the circles centered.

I then select all the lines and group them. Same with the circles. Then I select both groups and choose Divide from the Pathfinder Palette and that creates all the tiles. I then ungroup the whole mess.

Now for the big aztec its a simple, large-ish pattern. So, I just create two arcs, one for each inverse pattern, then duplicate them all around in a circle.

For the smaller subpaneling, I hand color 1/4 of the arc (you could do 1/8 if you wanted to) to make it as random as possible, then duplicate that around the rest of the circle.

The whole thing takes me maybe 2 hours. Its a lot of work but its 100% editable, and resolution independent, and I can fit it to any shape I want to, which is really hard in Photoshop. I used this whole process on all parts of my ver 3 Enterprise which you can see here. I also used custom UV mapping to eliminate any texture stretching or tiling. I think the results speak for themsleves.

Thanks Kakaze! I just copy and paste the pixels from one program to another and it seems to do fine. But I will look into your reply. And sorry for hijacking the thread, I thought it died. OOPS!