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I'm wondering if there is a easier way to change a color in Illustrator.
Let's say I have multiple characters for whom I want to change their skin, eye, hair color multiple times. Is there plugin or something that could ease my work rather than selecting same fill color (this works but it could be easier) or recolor artwork (in this case this isn't really make it easier)
In an ideal world I would like to have 5 different squares with 5 different fills and anytime I would change the color of 1 square it would chnage the color of the whole artwork.
Use global swatches.
https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/illustrator/how-to/global-color-swatch.html
I had a go at this. Might be easier to see in the HD gfycat though:
It's pretty barebones, inspired of After Effects expression controls and the UI is very simple, but initial tests show it working. The Github repo with download link and install instructions is here.
A few notes:
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Use global swatches.
https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/illustrator/how-to/global-color-swatch.html
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In case you are not using global swatches, the Recolour Artwork capabilities are certainly way more powerful than the Select > Same commands.
Admittedly, the modal dialog based approach of Recolour Artwork may be a bit confusing and it may take some time to familiarise yourself with all the various settings and options.
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"I would change the color of 1 square it would chnage the color of the whole artwork. "
How would it know what to change all the other colors to? The Recolor artwork dialog is enabled by defining color relationships in the artwork so that moving one color will change the other colors, but that's the best you can get. It could be accomplished with some kind of extension or plugin, but it would have to emulate a lot of what Recolor artwork already does in that regard.
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Swatch UI is pretty awful though and Recolor Artwork isn't straightforward to change specific color values. You could emulate what After Effects does with Color Expression Controls pretty easily via tags, then have a color picker which triggers all colors of this tag value to change to the new value
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I had a go at this. Might be easier to see in the HD gfycat though:
It's pretty barebones, inspired of After Effects expression controls and the UI is very simple, but initial tests show it working. The Github repo with download link and install instructions is here.
A few notes:
I didn't test this much and I have no idea if it's going to hold up in large, complex documents. But it should retain all the controls even when you close and reopen the same document in Illustrator so long as you save this document after generating the menu.