Allow Free Distort like Photoshop

Well I had a very interesting conference call with some of the Illustrator engineering team in India this week, and while there's obviously no guarantee that any of my feedback will result in feature changes, the issue of how the free distort tool behaves was covered in some detail - along with a bunch of other things - and they were very receptive and understanding, so I'm hopeful we may see movement on this in the not-too-distant future

I've had some success by going to Envelop Distort > Make with Mesh, changing the defaults to 1 cell each. This is the key to simulating photoshop's free distort, 1 grid cell only. Using the direct select tool on the corners allows distortion "similar" to photoshop. Further, the corner points will have "handles" which allow control over the curvature of the vectors connecting corner points (which can actually be better than ps's controls).

Illustrator 2014 for me is a breath of freshness, but I agree. According to me the problem is primarily the interface and logic tools. Working techniques are inconsistent even annoying. ;(

Ok, so Illustrator CC2014 finally has an integrated free distort tool. Except... we still have the problem of the bounding rectangle being reset after every drag operation. Seriously, how hard is it to understand how people want to use this feature? Illustrator has only just gained the ability to remember the rotated angle of an object so you can go back and alter it after clicking off it, so I guess I shouldn't hold my breath for this!?

OK....so it's three years on from that original post (and the problem was around for years before that). We have seen all kinds of silly unnecessary fluff appear in the versions of Illustrator since then, but this fundamental bug still remains. It's such an important part of any workflow, and is so well implemented by the Adobe folks at Photoshop and After Effects. If anyone who programs Illustrator is reading this, please PLEASE admit that you're really not very good - just go Effect > Distort & Transform > Free Distort to see what I mean (look at that interface! Where's the Preview? Is this chunk of code from the 1980s?). Please swallow your misplaced pride, and ask one of the AE or PS people to do your job for you - properly. They'd probably fix the problem in 5 minutes. Admit it to yourself, your 'O' level in BASIC programming from 1979 just won't cut it any more.

We all know that AI is a piece of junk - old bits of hastily cobbled-together code from various vintages, so please concentrate on just making it NOT SUCK, before you try to add a veneer of shiny new features to distract people from the underlying problems this piece of bloatware has. It really needs re-writing from the ground up, just not in COBOL or FORTRAN.

....not that this will go anywhere...what am I going to do? Use FreeHand instead?! Ugh. The joys of a monopoly.

If EVERYONE who faces this problem in Illustrator submits a bug report (because it IS a bug - surely this is not "as designed"?!), maybe someone might take notice, and in another 3 years' time, the problem might get fixed. We can live in hope.....

I haven't ploughed through every post in this thread, so it might have been mentioned already...but there is a kind-of (not very good) workaround, using Object > Envelope Distort > Make with Mesh (and set the mesh to 1x1). The corners have stupid Bezier handles, which won't go away, even using the Anchor Point Tool, so it will try to warp/bend the thing all over the place. But with some careful faffing around, and assuming you don't mind the artwork ending up a bit bent, you can get almost acceptable results.

You can simply do this by using the transform tool while holding 'command' for a mac. This allows you to drag the corners of a shape individually, effectively the same function as the free distort tool in illustrator. Hope this helps

This thread's been open for nearly 3 years and not once has anyone from Adobe so much has acknowledged it. Really makes you want to fork over £50 a month for this crap, doesn't it?

The behavior of this tool do not you just surprising. It reminds Paint program than a program for graphics work.

GIF ANIM:

  Perhaps, it is worth adding to the options icon Mesh Tool?

Then you could use the existing options for WRAP needed distortion, provided that you add a new option to wrap "straight lines". need for such distortion or something similar?

Generally tools illustrator often resemble running the maze, or something similar....

and nothing has changed over the years. with the exception of 17.1

http://forums.adobe.com/message/3024857#3024857

Yes! Yes! Yes!

Kris_Hunt wrote: In Photoshop, you can pull an image's control handles around to your heart's content, and fine tune the distortion to line up with a perspective grid. In Illustrator, you can only distort the bounding box of the whole shape, so once you move a single control handle, you lose control of one or more corners of the image, making precise distortions almost impossible. The best we have right now is the Effect > Distort & Transform > Free Distort tool, but there's no preview, so again, you can't line up the shape with a perspective grid. Please make Illustrator's Free Distort tool like Photoshop's!

There is a free distort tool in illustrator.

The free transform tool can be used to distort (without using the Effects menu) - http://help.adobe.com/en_US/illustrator/cs/using/WS714a382cdf7d304e7e07d0100196cbc5f-647aa.html#WS714a382cdf7d304e7e07d0100196cbc5f-6479a

Scroll down to the portion that says Distort and read the whole thing. It takes a second to understand, but it works really well!!!