Another spiral question that's been nagging me: does Illustrator provide any way to create a linear (Archimedes) spiral? I'm trying to create a spiral where the distance between the windings is constant. It looks like Illustrator only makes logarithmic spirals, where the angle of the windings is constant but the distance between grows bigger with each successive winding.
If not, are there third-party plug-ins or solutions of any kind?
I suppose I could write the curve in Postscript, but that seems like work. :)
I actually dug out Freehand but its Spiral tool wouldn't do more than 200 windings. Good for future reference but not so much for this project. What I ended up doing was stealing this Postscript code:
And imported it into CS4 after tweaking the code in a text editor. I got about 500 windings before Illustrator reported running out of memory (Activity Monitor said I still had 6GB free). I was hoping for more, but 500 is quite a lot. I think this will do very nicely!
Hi. I am trying to understand these messages but am a bit confused. I am trying to create a spiral that looks like a tornado... bigger on top and smaller on the bottom. Is there a simple tool inside Illustrator that I can create one with? Thank you for any help.
Take a look at http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b87878/0
To make a tornado-like shape you have to start off with a curved funnel-shaped object with no fill or stroke. Revolve it 360° and then map the graphics onto it. Flat spirals are not a good way to start for this one :-)
Thanks SJRiegel, I know of the script. I also run CS4 so I can run old Scriptographer scripts. I wish Adobe would make their shape creation tools better. People have been using these scripts since 2010 ... how difficult is it to wrap the most useful of them into the existing tools?
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