We Need An Outline Extrude Feature

[Sunburst Stephen]

If there's one thing Illustrator is conspicuously missing, its an "Outline Extrude" feature. Other, more primative vector software has this as a built in feature, but I've yet to see anyone discover a simple way of achieving it in Illustrator without manually removing and adjusting a lot of anchor points. As shown in the image below, it's quite simple to duplicate an outline to use as a little faux shadow, but to connect that "shadow" into the original outline as if it were the outlines faux-3D edge involves merging the two shapes, and selectively deleting anchor points and smoothing curves, which can be quite painstaking for an entire logo. I have seen some suggest using the "blend" tool to add incremental morph steps from the outline to the shadow, but doing so just results in a messier staircase of right angles to clean up manually if you want a clean and tidy vector. The other imperfect solution would be to use Illustrator's clumsy 3D tools, but those 3D tools have the unfortunate side-effect of changing the 3D perspective of the original outline shape, and results in the new 3D edge being in perspective as well rather than keeping their appearance in-tact while adding a 3D edge with a simple orthographic perspective (akin to the simple drop-shadow style shown below.) And more often than not the 3D tools in Illustrator result in the vector being converted into a raster image, which is not what anyone using Illustrator is after. If anyone knows a better solution to this problem, I'd be happy to hear it, otherwise I hope Adobe adds this feature in a future update, as it's been available in lesser software as a simple, one-click effect for over two decades.

[westdr1dw]

Can this be done in Graphic Styles?

I am fairly new and still in the crawl stage so just a SWAG. Just an intital impression from the short time using AI is they are beginning to make some enhancments which has been long overdue. This is only a perception comparing the advances with the Adobe photography apps over the past several years.

[Sunburst Stephen]

I've been using Illustrator for years, but hadn't even taken a look at Graphic Styles until you brought them up.  There's no end to learning. Now that I've had a look at it there IS a Graphic Styles library called "3D Effects", but even opening the library gives me an error saying my modestly powerful computer doesn't have enough RAM to load that particular library. Some of them loaded anyway so I tried those out, but they all seem to affect the perspective of the original shapes, and they might just be shortcuts for things you can do with the 3D tools anyway. So unless you know of a specific Graphic Style that does what I'm looking for, I'm not convinced it solves this particular problem, but thank you for pointing me to a feature I didn't know about. I'll be sure to spend some time experimenting with it.

[Monika Gause · Accepted solution]

In the attached file is a graphic style (you need to open it in Illustrator, not just double click) 

If you want to rotate the shadow in other directions, you need 2 more transform effects: https://youtu.be/F6dOU1Jh3t4 

[Ton Frederiks]

Nice, makes it very flexible.

[Sunburst Stephen]

Thanks for this! I wish it didn't have to be a "work around" and was a proper feature of Illustrator, but this is exactly what I needed!

[westdr1dw]

There is no end to the learning aspects in any trade. Which is why sharing is so important for me at least. Monika is the AI guru. She post on Youtube every Tues. Instead of reaching for the paper with my coffee I like to see what she is posting. Frankly, I discovered Graphic Styles last night trying to apply an Outline to image text. I am coming over from the Photoshop/LrC world and trying to gain the knowledge on how I can expand add some of this towards laser engraving. The tools Adobe provides is truly amazing. However, we have to share this knowledge. There are several AI masters out there. Monika is always willing to share her expertise. 

[Monika Gause]

Thank you for your kind words @westdr1dw 

And I'm so glad you like what I'm posting on YouTube and get inspiration from it.

[Ton Frederiks]

This is one for Monika who has some solutions described here:

https://www.vektorgarten.de/long-shadows-with-illustrator.html

I agree that this should be build into Illustrator (as an Effect).

You may want to vote here:

https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657-illustrator-desktop-feature-requests/suggestions/349...

[Sunburst Stephen]

I certainly do want to vote there. This is exactly the feature I'm describing. The tutorial you sent seems like a lot more steps than what is required in other software, but I'll definitely give it a shot and see if it's a better solution that the other suggestions I've seen. Thanks!

[Monika Gause]

If you also have Astute Graphics plugins, use their Blockshadow Effect for it.

[Sunburst Stephen]

Thanks for the tip. I'll be sure to check that plugin out!

[Bobby Henderson]

The AG Block Shadow plugin works really well. It doesn't have as many options as the Extrude tool in CorelDRAW, but I think it delivers cleaner looking results. The effect in CorelDRAW can generate a lot of anchor point trash.

[Sunburst Stephen]

The software I know the effect from is "Gerber Omega" which I would argue is vastly inferior to both Illustrator AND CorelDRAW, but it DOES have a leg up with this feature and doesn't generate the anchor point trash like Corel.

[Bobby Henderson]

I never did get into using Gerber Omega. But Gerber really tried hard to build its own "walled garden" of hardware and software. A long time ago we had a Gerber Signmaker 4B, which we sold to a company that carved/sand-blasted cemetary head stones. The 4B was great at cutting sand blasting stencil masks. That's going way way back in terms of computing technology. I started out using CASmate (alongside Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW). When Amiable Technologies bought out Scanvec our shop's licenses of CASmate were converted to licenses of FlexiSign (Pro or Expert depending on the parallel port hardware dongle). We still use Flexi on computers connected to vinyl cutters and/or routing tables. Like CASmate, Flexi has a block shadow effect. But it doesn't generate the best results. Putting it bluntly, the sign making "CAS" apps are growing ever more irrelevant. I had a Flexi license on my work PC, but I put it on another production PC back in the 2000's and I'm the lead designer. For design tasks applications like Adobe Illustrator can do so much more. As far as I can tell, none of the dedicated sign making apps have yet to include support for Variable Fonts. That's just astonishing. Sign shops need industry specific apps to run routing tables. We're heavily reliant on RIP applications for large format printing. A plugin for Illustrator or CorelDRAW can drive a vinyl cutter. But we can also print and cut via our large format RIP applications too. On the design "front end" Adobe Illustrator is very difficult to beat.