Tips

February 20, 2024

New PopArt live symbols for AxoTools

PopArt symbols can be dragged from a symbols panel and AxoTools will automatically expand them to fit your choice of axonometric planes in your current document projection. This includes extruded art, art with compound rotations, and with moves along axes.

For example, say you’re building an axonometric village and you want awnings over some of your windows. Rather than build them, or copy and paste them from a previous project, you can store one as a PopArt symbol and drag them into your document as needed.

PopArt demo

You’re not limited to just isometric, either. PopArt will expand and conform to any face in any document projection you set, including an auxiliary projection.

PopArt turn values

table, chairs, umbrella

PopArt can contain several layered objects at various angles. In this illustration, only two PopArt chairs created the four seen here, and the table with umbrella is all one symbol.

Please see the AxoTools documentation for more information on creating and using AxoTools PopArt symbols. And please let me know if you create PopArt symbols you’re willing to share with others!

January 15, 2024

AxoTools adds control bar

Rick Johnson

Illustrator users know that we need panels to access controls and options, but it quickly fills valuable working screen space. Collapsing panels to icons helps, but repeatedly opening and closing them can be a hassle, as well. One option Adobe brilliantly engineered for Illustrator is the control bar that shows a limited number of essential controls consolidated into in a thin strip.

control bar

The newest version of AxoTools now includes a control bar as well. You can access it in the menu Window > AxoTools > AxoTools Control.

The first item shows at a glance the projection of the current document. Double-click it to open the Projection panel to change it. Next is a label showing the current document’s scale ratio and units used in AxoTools’ panels that calculate scale measurements. Again, double-click the label to open the Preferences dialog to change the scale or units.

Next is a series of four buttons to project or unproject art, which work exactly like the buttons in the Projection panel.

The next set of four buttons control options that affect projecting and other functions. The first one selects whether reference points are used. This one has a blue background when active to make it easier to spot since you would normally want to keep this option off unless you are busy projecting art from various ortho views to an axonometric view as described here.

The next option controls whether to automatically project a copy of the selected art. The third button chooses whether to rotate ellipses so that the anchor points align on the major and minor axis when projected. Fourth is the option to apply properties in the Draw Settings panel when projecting art.

At the far right is a shortcut to open AxoTools’ online documentation.

Are there other items you would like to see included here? They could static like these controls, or dynamic — visible only under some conditions. Let me know what you need!

November 14, 2023

Fastener libraries for AxoTools

Rick Johnson

One of the new features in AxoTools is adding fastener libraries in the form of specially-formatted symbol libraries. AxoTools comes with a fastener library, and you can add others. Industrial Artworks has already created a library of nearly a hundred high-quality fastener symbols, which is available for purchase.

industrial artworks library

To install AxoTools’ symbol library, open the AxoTools Fasteners panel. In its flyout menu, select the item to Update “AxoTools Fasteners.ai” file.

A dialog will ask you to confirm whether you really want to install it. Click the OK button, or press Escape to cancel..

dialog for fastener symbols on desktop

You will probably get a message that the file and folder cannot be created in the Symbols folder. Click the Yes button to create it on your desktop.

You should now see a folder named “AxoTools Symbols” on your desktop. Navigate to your Symbols folder, located in your Adobe Illustrator application folder in Presets > [Language] > Symbols, and copy the “AxoTools Symbols” folder here. Your operating system will ask you for permission to copy the file. If you look in this folder, you’ll see one Illustrator file named “AxoTools Symbols.ai” which you can open to see the available symbols and read instructions on how to create your own fastener symbols. If you purchase an additional symbol library or create your own, this is where the file should be placed.

Restart Illustrator. On launch, AxoTools will look for this folder to load fastener symbols into their corresponding menus in the Fasteners panel. If you also install the Industrial Artworks symbol library, your Screw variations menu should look like this:

The divider separates generated symbols drawn for any projection from the symbol-based fasteners, which are typically drawn in isometric. The two slotted hex screws and two drywall screws come with AxoTools. The items identified with “IA” are from Industrial Artworks.

Please let me know how your experience goes with installing, using, and perhaps creating fastener symbol libraries.

April 9, 2023

AxoTools Gallery: see what others are creating with AxoTools

Rick Johnson

Illustrators all over the world have been creating amazing work with AxoTools. You can see a sampling of them in the new AxoTools Gallery. Many thanks to all who contributed. One of the entries is shown below.

Library book shelf modules, Vladivostok, Russia

These bookshelves in the form of Cyrillic letters were designed by Egor Chistyakov. He started with the shelf front surface as a compound path, then extruded with multiple line weights and shaded color. Shadows and other details were added.

AxoTools Gallery

February 15, 2023

What does AxoTools’ Zone tool do, anyway?

Rick Johnson

The purpose of AxoTool’s Zone tool is not intuitively obvious, and most of the time you really won’t even need it. Here’s an example of a situation, though, where it’s really helpful. Say you want to move the chimney in the isometric view away from the house, using “move by reference” where you drag in the corresponding right ortho view. This function only works when reference points are enabled (you set this in AxoTools’ preferences, or more easily with the icon in the Projection panel).

Select the Axo Tool, which is used for moving art along various axes, and for editing reference points.

With this tool selected, reference points will be visible. Note the locations of the left and right reference points (see the online docs for instructions on locating reference points). Select the chimney art that you want to move, then drag horizontally in the right view as indicated by the arrow.

zones 1

But look what happens when you drag. The art moves the wrong direction!

Why is that? By default, the tool senses that the closest reference point is the left one, so it assumes that must be the view you’re dragging in. The solution is the use the Zone tool to draw rectangles around the left and right ortho views, as shown here.

zones 2

After each zone is drawn, just click the button in the dialog to indicate which zone you defined.

With left and right zones defined, and the Axo tool again selected, drag in the right view and it correctly moves the art along the axis you had intended.

You don’t need to define zones for every view, only those where the problem described here is likely to happen. Leaving more space between views will also help avoid this situation, but then it’s nice to have your ortho views close enough that you can see where things line up. For best results, be sure you’re using the latest version of AxoTools, 23.2.3.2.

January 7, 2023

Planning an axonometric projection to fit your space

Rick Johnson

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I hope you find this useful.

January 1, 2023

Horizontal extruding

Rick Johnson

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

More user-requested options are coming soon.

December 2, 2022

AxoTools user survey

Rick Johnson

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.