Problem with blend on organic shapes

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
October 17, 2022
2 replies
370 views

Hello all,

I am struggling to find the problem with this path I am trying to use blend on. I need a simple organic design with an inner and outer path, with 4 paths blended in the middle that converge in a uniform way at each corner. I am having some success, but not on all my designs. These are just a couple samples to demonstrate the issue. One shows a sample thatr worked perfectly. The other has crazy problems in the corners.

I have tried both minimizing the anchors and made sure to have the exact same number of anchors in each path. This sample doesn't have the anchors minimized as low as I could go, but it didn't help when I did that.

Can anyone shed some light onto what it takes to make this tool work the way I want it to?

This topic has been closed for replies.

Monika Gause

Community Expert

Use the direct selection tool and select some corresponding anchor points on each path. The same number of anchors needs to be selected on each path.

Then use the blend tool and click on one pair of points: first the one on one path then the corresponding one on the other path.

David QueueAuthor

Participant

So I managed to get most of the design completed. However, I am totally stuck on this on part. I have checked the path directions are matching. I have also checked on and tried with and without: single handle corners, joined corners, more anchors, cuting spine into more segnents near the corner "joint" which isn't really joined. I foind that I am completely unable to make the rest of the art work if the paths are two single closed paths. I have broken them up into segnemts and all my joints blended well. This is a part of a design that will go to a glowforge. I am not sure if the parts will run properly without a closed path, but we'll see!

The biggest issue now is that these two parts, the two paths going top upper right to lower left, and the other two that look like nested letter C's... They are supposed to be joined together. Whenever I move the C's to a specific point too far to the left, right where they are about to meet their mating paths, the blend goes all crazy on me. Am I missing something here? I have googled and tinkered to the point that this one little segment of the art is preventin me from completeing this entire job. Any helo would be hugely appreciated.

Monika Gause

Community Expert

I'm not quite sure what I am supposed to be seeing in the screenshots. 2 of them look OK.

Mylenium

Legend

Well, the simple answer would be to use more anchor points. Some of your points have extremely long handles in relation to the distance the path covers and that would result in the normal calculations for the vectors ending up "far out in space" and having precision issues. This would be especially apparent in areas where the path curvature abruptly changes direction and turns from convex to concave, which unther the hood means the extreme normals end up intersecting instead of smoothly fitting in the short distance. It's a math thing and your example is a classic advertisement for Astute's VectorScribe to a) refine the paths with more points to stabilize the solution and b) later clean up the result without working your fingers off, even though you can of course to it manually in AI.

Mylenium

David QueueAuthor

Participant

Thank you for the tips. Your recommendation is ironic to me, because what I read somewhere else about a similar problem, was to use pathscribes delete points brush to reduce the amount of points on the path. I did try that brush, but it ended up doing unexpected things. It added some points where I didn't have any. It also changed some of my points that had two handles to single handle points, this was only on the corners of the acute angles. This ended up causing my paths to have different amounts of anchors and differing handles in some of the respective locations. So after all that, I ended up manually changing them all to what I have shown you in the screenshots.

So, I will try what you suggested. I have used pathscribe for years, since it was called vectorscribe. I primarily used ot for other features, though. I bought their plug-ins first for better handles and mostly used that. So I am not that familiar with these other features. What tool are you referring to that you said will "refine path"? I am not at my station and quickly google searched it, but can't find which tool you're suggesting. I'll try it layer today when I get back and follow up here.

Thanks again for your help!

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