Live Effect Plugin UI Modal Dialog

[Doubl3]

Hello developing friends,

I've created a plugin with a live effect.

The effect works great but now i want to introduce som tweakable parameters.

In the example code  GetInputFromUser is invoked from the User Suite when the EditLiveEffectParameters method is fired by the plugin.

But this only takes 1 parameter and is not really a modal dialog wich can tweake the effect 'live'.

What I want to achieve is the same behavior as for example the  transform live effect.

You click the effect in the appereance panel and the dialogue open allowing for tweaking and live feedback of these tweakes.

Could anybody show me the way? 🙂

[A. Patterson]

Illustrator doesn't provide a UI framework beyond what you've already discovered. If you want a dialog, you'll have to basically write it yourself from platform code or some UI toolkit. We use Qt, but I can tell that while it works great, there's no small amount of work to get it working Illustrator. 

Something that might be what you're looking for is HotDoorCore, found at http://hotdoorcore.com/

This is written by the guys at HotDoor, who make CadTools, a suite of Illustrator plugins. This SDK wraps the Illustrator SDK, so you'd probably have to move your calls to theirs, but they're all similarly named (because it's a wrapper) so it shouldn't be too difficult. Best of all though, it comes with UI built in. It's probably your best bet for getting to where you want to go quickly.

[Doubl3]

Thanks for you answer and time.

Hotdoor looks very nice, but int he end I did not use it because its a comitment that feels rigid over the long term. Expecialy with bigger projects.

I've probably missformulated my question.

Building ui's here is done with CEP extensions and works great.

But I wanted to know the mechanics of opening a modal(wich is allready created in CEP) and doing live edits on the effect when tweaking the the dails in the Modal.

But as of writing this, I've meanwhile established that I can open the modal when I click the effect in the appearence panel. And figured out that I could edit and live update the effect with the : sAIArtStyleParser->EditEffectParameters(artStyle, parserLiveEffect);

This invokes the EditLiveEffectParameters method and from there the GoLiveEffect method.

Thus live updating the effect.

Thx again anyway!

[A. Patterson]

Sorry for misunderstanding, but glad you figured it out -- we've done some of that work ourselves so, yeah, that's the way to do it all right 🙂