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Rick Johnson

About Rick Johnson

https://rj-graffix.com

https://rj-graffix.com/about/

Posts by Adobe Wan Kenobe:

SelectMenu updated with new types, select by name

SelectMenu has been updated to add more art types, as well as a new select-by-name function.

Select art by name

Now you can select objects by their name, as displayed in the Layers panel. In the menu item Select > Object > Art by Name and you will see this dialog:

Select Menu select art by name

Choose whether the art name should contain the text you enter or if it should match exactly. Text is not case-sensitive, so the common rectangle, for example, with the name “<Rectangle>” would include “rect” entered in lower case. Please note that non-ASCII characters like accented characters and traditional Chinese are not currently recognized.

Menu selections can be recorded as Actions and played back to be included as part of other automations.

By user request, the long, long menu has been divided into groups to make items easier to find. Here are the menu groups:

Main menu:

Adobe’s Select > Object menu ends with Area Type. SelectMenu plugin adds the following items:

Path Text Objects
Legacy Text Objects
Guides
Paths

Paths with attributes:

Open Paths
Closed Paths
Filled Paths
Unfilled Paths
Stroked Paths
Unstroked Paths
Dashed Paths
Undashed Paths
Compound Paths

Basic art attributes:

Styled Art
Unstyled Art
Opaque Art
Transparent Art
Overprinting Art
Effects Applied

Basic art types:

Groups
Symbols
Path Blends
Gradient Meshes
Raster Art
Placed Art
Graphs
Non-native Art

Special Art Types:

Live Objects (Plugin Art)
Envelopes
Flares
Image Traces
Live Paint Art
Symbol Sets
AxoTools Live Art
Compound Shapes
Opacity Masks
Intertwines (AI 2023+ only)

Repeats:

(AI 2021+ only)

Radial Repeats
Grid Repeats
Mirror Repeats

I’d like to thank Jeen Hung for his assistance in making many of these newer selection types possible.

SelectMenu is still free. The updated version is available for Adobe Illustrator CC 2019 and up, for macOS and Windows platforms. You can find it here on the plugins download page.

Planning an axonometric projection to fit your space

Sometimes we need to create a projected drawing to fit a particular space. Many of us know the sinking feeling of finding too late that our usual projection (think isometric) just doesn’t fit, and we either live with an orientation that looks like a mistake or we start over. Fortunately AxoTools makes it easy to find out ahead of time what projection is likely to work for us.

An example of dodging that bullet is a cutaway drawing of a steam locomotive I did for Trains magazine’s special publication on Union Pacific’s newly-restored “Big Boy” locomotive no. 4014.

Big Boy centers-read

drawings from Locomotive Cyclopedia

It had to fit into a 3-page foldout, 24.5×11 inches, with room for a headline on the left side and additional information somewhere on the right. I immediately imagined the head in the upper left, with the locomotive facing the lower-left corner. Oh oh. The only detailed reference drawings we had, from the company’s Steam Locomotive Cyclopedia, showed the right side of the locomotive. The two sides are a bit different, so we can’t just reflect it.

This locomotive is a monster, so I couldn’t risk going too far down the wrong road. In addition to the company’s own previously-published scale drawings, they had some detailed shop drawings from the Union Pacific Railroad itself, so there were strong advantages to drawing it to a real scale (with CADtools) rather than just stretching one reference drawing to fit. Since any axonometric drawing will be foreshortened to some extent, I tried a scale of 3/16″ = 1 foot. For the sake of planning, I placed a rough scanned image in the artboard, then tried various projections.

fitting 3

As I expected, isometric wouldn’t work well at all.

fitting 4

Dimetric with angles of 15 and 45 degrees seemed to work better, but you’ll need to repeat these steps with the top and end views to be sure if there’s really room for them.

fitting 5

AxoTools offers an interactive alternative to the trial-by-error approach, which takes all three faces into account. Position placeholders for the three planes like surfaces of a cardboard box, and note the corner where they all meet.

fitting 6

Select the top view and, in the Transformations, panel, click “Create Transformation Object.” With the Axo (move) tool, click in the corner where the three views meet to set its anchor there. Next choose the orientation Axo Top-Left or Axo Top-Right as is appropriate for your drawing. Your art will immediately conform to your current document projection in the Projection panel.

fitting 7

Now do the same for the left and right views, placing the anchor in the common point and setting their orientation to Axo Left and Axo Right.

fitting 9

Now select the three faces and choose the menu item View > Hide Edges. In the Projection panel you can try different preset projections from the menu at the bottom of the panel, or for more fine-tuned results, change values in the axes or tilt/turn values, or drag the dial controls to find your best settings.

fitting animation

Now that you’ve established a projection that will fit, you can delete the placeholder art and begin drawing and projecting your final art with confidence.

fitting 10

I hope you find this useful.

Tag72a adds user scripts for document events

Tag72a settings

It seems that everyone running Tag72a needs something unique in their document information reporting. The settings panel has grown considerably trying to address as many user requests as possible, but along with flexibility comes the appearance of complexity!

One more preference has now been added, however, that should serve the purpose of countless additional items: the option to automatically run user scripts along with its own updates.

Why would you want to run a custom script? Well, for example:

  • Reformat a date to any of the many alternatives to the two formats in Tag72a.
  • Parse a filename to derive additional information such as version, language, region.
  • Re-order the spot color list so that certain colors are always shown first.

Simply check the “Run user scripts” option and Tag72a will look for and run any found scripts by these names.

  • Tag72a_doc_opened
  • Tag72a_doc_changed
  • Tag72a_doc_print
  • Tag72a_doc_save
  • Tag72a_doc_save_copy_as
  • Tag72a_update
  • Tag72a_every_event

You only need to use the script (or scripts) that are relevant to you. Some things to keep in mind are:

  • Doc Changed event happens every time a user switches from one document to another, including when a new document is opened or sometimes when a document is closed. You may not want to use both Doc Opened and Doc Changed events if one or the other does what you want. If both Doc Opened and Doc Changed run, it is not a bug, because Adobe Illustrator signals to the plugin that both events took place.
  • Doc Print and Doc Save happen just before the actual save or print takes place.
  • Doc Save Copy As happens just after you have saved a copy as, which enables the data to be updated from the saved version back to the currently-open version.
  • Update happens only when you click the Update button in the panel.
  • Every Event happens right after any of the other scripts runs, and works for all events regardless of what other scripts are there. You may want to put some scripting in Every Event and other scripting in specific events, depending on your needs.
  • All scripts run after Tag72a makes its own updates.
  • Your scripts may need to check the contents of the document to determine whether the script needs to run, because another event may have just run the script. Then again, it may not hurt anything if your script happens to run twice.

You can use either AppleScript or JavaScript. The plugin will run whichever version of the script Adobe Illustrator added to its Scripts menu.

If you write a custom script for one or more of these events, please share your idea with other users!

Horizontal extruding

First, I’d like to thank everyone who participated in the AxoTools survey. The meaningful comments are already making a difference in AxoTools’ features and documentation.

The most surprising thing was the number of users who wanted to extrude horizontally for a stylized drawing such as this one by Dörte Roßmann.

horizontal perspective

That seems like a natural thing for AxoTools to do, but we can’t forget that the plugin’s core function is to help illustrators work in views like isometric, dimetric, and trimetric where we see three surfaces, not two. It has never been a design tool, although there’s nothing wrong with bending the rules a bit to accomplish some design effects as long as it doesn’t hobble the plugin’s primary purpose.

Horizontal extruding has been available using the Extrude panel. Just set the angle to 0 and leave the option to project the art unchecked. That gives you something like this:

extrude panel 0 angle horizontal cylinder

If you projected the art with a 0° angle, you’d simply get a rectangle. The reason for this is that the Extrude panel, like the Extrude tool, work in the context of the current projection. If you drag a circle with the Extrude tool while holding the Cmd or Ctl key for a freeform angle, you’ll see that at a horizontal angle, all you see is a side view of your original shape.

horizontal extruding

To make things easier for people working with horizontal extruding, the Projection panel in the latest free update to AxoTools now supports broader Tilt and Turn values, which allows you to do a full-fledged horizontal extrusion.
Projection panel with 0 tilt  horizontal cylinder
Previously, values of 0 or 90 were not allowed for Tilt or Turn because they essentially hid one or even two of the three axonometric planes. Now, using a Tilt value of 0, or Turn value of 0 or 90, will disable the X and Z axis fields because there must be an incline on both axes in order to calculate the tilt and turn — in a case like this, the turn value is ambiguous. A Tilt value of 90 is essentially a top axo view, so Tilt is limited to 89°.
It’s important to understand, too, that at projections where the X and Z axes overlap, horizontal extruding is always on the X axis, so using the Extrude tool, the edges always drag out to the left. Can that be “fixed” to allow horizontal extruding to the right? Well, yes, if we add complications to an interface that some people say is already way too complicated. A workaround is that, with a Tilt value of 0, the Extrude panel extends your path to the left, while with other Tilt values, the panel extends it to the right.
In response to user requests, you can now press Shift when dragging with the Extrude tool to constrain to right angles. That won’t give you the above effect, though, because it’s constraining a freeform extrude. That is, it’s calculating what that shape looks like within your current projection, not a shadow effect.
If you truly want to go completely independent of the document’s current projection, you can always use the Transformations panel, which allows you to rotate and extrude your art in any orientation you like, be it upside-down or even backward.
Transformations panel
More user-requested options are coming soon.

AxoTools adds Action support

Now you can record and play back actions that include many AxoTools functions, with the free update to AxoTools available online for Adobe Illustrator CC 2019 through 2023. Actions currently supported include:

  • Project art to or from an axonometric plane
  • Extrude, either from the tool or the panel
  • Axo Scale
  • Axo Rotate
  • Axo Shear
  • Axo Move
  • Axo Rectangle
  • Axo Ellipse

Actions will play back using the current document projection settings. That is, if you recorded moving or extruding an object along an axis of an isometric view, then changed your document’s projection, it would adjust to operate using the current projection. Action playback also honors your current draw settings and Projection panel options so old actions adapt to your current environment.

One example of using actions with AxoTools is a technique to do a block shadow effect (even though AxoTools was never made for that).

  1. Select path art to which you want to add a shadow
  2. Start recording the action
  3. Select Edit > Copy
  4. Extrude the art without projecting it, using either the Extrude panel or Extrude tool
  5. Set the fill and stroke of the extruded and selected art to your shadow color
  6. Select Edit > Paste in Front
  7. Stop recording

Now any time you want to add a similar block shadow, just select your art and run this action!

block shadow action

I’m curious what ingenious actions other AxoTools users will come up with. Maybe one to construct a detailed hex nut? Please let us know in the comments below.

AxoTools user survey

AxoTools Projection panel

If you’ve used AxoTools, either as a trial or as part of your everyday work, please take the AxoTools user survey to help us improve the plugin and its user experience.

AxoTools user survey

This will help to identify:

  • Which features are most important, or least important
  • Which features to revise, and which to leave alone
  • Direction for development of new tutorial videos and documentation

How can we make AxoTools work better for you? Your observations and concerns are important to us.

Multiple line weights in technical illustration

You may have seen a recent video summarizing methods to use multiple line weights in your illustrations.

It’s probably helpful to go into a bit more detail and show more examples.

single line weightUsing a single line weight (or “stroke width” as it applies to Illustrator’s path art property) is a simple and efficient way to work. 

upper-left shaded line weight

By using more than one line weight, however, your illustrations can have more interest and suggest form.

One method assumes a light source in the upper left. Here edges facing away from the light are given a heavier weight. This was the standard where I worked at Kalmbach Publishing Co. in the 1970s. My mentors there told me it was adopted from a standard for US Patent Office drawings. It was easy to apply using pen and ink, but when they switched from Rapidograph pen to Adobe Illustrator in the 1990s, they switched to a single line weight. Adobe Illustrator, unfortunately, doesn’t lend itself well to multiple line weights, especially if the path is filled.

GP30 hood line exampleHere’s an example of an illustration I did using the “Kalmbach” method, drawn in ink at 1.5 times reproduction size. Detail lines were drawn with a 4×0 Rapidograph pen, and the heavy lines were probably a no. 0 or 1 pen. In those days, we typically cut an Amberlith overlay to add a flat tint to the background, which helped separate the subject from the background.

dual line weightA more common method called “line contrast shading” used in exploded-view parts drawings uses heavier lines on all outside edges of objects. In this example, the bottom of the cube and cylinder are thin lines because they represent the joint between two surfaces. A heavy line would suggest the objects float above the other art. In the case of the round hole, a varied line width makes a smooth transition between the front- and rear-facing edges. Complex illustrations can use three or four line weights. Standards are more like guidelines, actually, that vary between people and between businesses, often based largely on the personal preference of someone with experience and/or influence.

filter drawingfilter drawing

Greg Maxson drew these filter illustrations with pen-and-ink on Mylar for Hyster Co. back in the late 80’s. He explained, “You could really get lost in the detail with pen-and-ink. Lines within an object are thin, exterior object lines are heavier, and exterior object lines that are down and away from the light source are heavier and darker still. The heavying up of the lines down and away from the light source was typically used when illustrating larger equipment, machinery, etc. to give those objects more visual weight. Appropriate for rendering a bulldozer, but less appropriate for rendering the exploded illustration of an ink pen, for example. Of course, super thin interior object lines were/are common when used to represent less than 90 degree radii, and thin broken lines to represent a highlight along an edge, knurling, screening, etc.”

suspension drawingGreg used a three weight treatment  on this Raptor suspension illustrations for Car and Driver magazine.

Maxson spark plugOne more piece by Greg Maxson shows his skill at technical illustration using a variety of software, often including SketchUp, Illustrator, and others. Here he adds clarity to the subject with varied line weights, line colors, sometimes sketchy line treatments, and meaningful shading and textures in filled areas.

When AxoTools adds add multiple line weights, it places stroked paths above non-stroked filled paths so weights can change as needed anywhere along the object without affecting the fill. With a simple click of the Axo Line tool, you can toggle weights between thick and thin as necessary. In the coming months, users can expect to see more refinements in AxoTools handling of stroke properties. Please contact me if you have ideas that can make your work faster or easier.

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