The CORE developer libraries used for the 2022 version of all Graffix plugins for Adobe Illustrator no longer support Illustrator versions older than CC 2019, so new and updated plugins will require CC 2019 and above. Plugins for CS6 through CC 2018 will remain available so new users with older systems can still use the latest legacy releases, then update whenever they’re ready.
CS6 – CC 2018 (Legacy) = plugin version 16
CC 2019 – AI 2021 = plugin version 16, will be replaced with version 23 as updates are made
AI 2022 = plugin version 23
All v.23 plugins honor v.16 licenses, so simply install as always, no special steps are required.
Updates to plugins for Adobe Illustrator 2022 (v. 26) are complete. Updated plugins now include:
AxoTools
Cleanup Tool
Concatenate
Cutting Tools
Nudge Panel
Select Menu
Square Up
TextSync
ToolShed
Apple M1 processors are also supported in the AI 2022 build.
Important note:
Graffix plugins compiled with CORE libraries which supported Adobe Illustrator versions back to CS6 have plugin versions 16.x (the minimum version of AI required). The latest CORE libraries for AI 2022 support only Illustrator CC 2019 (AI 23) and later, so new plugin releases will have plugin version 23.
If you purchased a license for a version 16 plugin, the 2022 compatibility update is free (as has been since CS6-to-CC) and the v. 16 activation code will continue to work in your v. 23 plugin.
If you’re running Graffix plugins under Illustrator 2021 or earlier, those plugins may occasionally get maintenance updates and will alert you when a v. 16 update becomes available. New features will be limited to the v 23 plugins on CC 2019 and later. For now, users will need to manually download and install the v. 23 version of the plugin, since the v 16 plugins only look for v. 16.x updates.
That said, only the 2022 versions are new v. 23 builds. AI23 – AI25 plugins will be replaced in the downloads section later, and those on the Support mailing list will be notified when they’re all ready.
If you do much freehand drawing with the pencil tool, I’m sure you’ll appreciate the Illustrator 25.3 update with the new canvas rotation feature. In preliminary testing, most Graffix plugins seem to work fine, with one notable exception.
In AxoTools under macOS Mojave, some panel controls such as dials, the Projection panel’s proxy cube, and the list in the Transformations panel appear blank. I’ll address these as soon as possible, but it will likely have to wait an update to the CORE libraries these plugins are based on. If this affects you, you may want to either update your OS or hold off on updating to AI 25.3, or also keep a second older version of Illustrator on your hard drive for when you need to use those AxoTools controls.
Compatibility with Apple’s new M1 processors is also expected in a new CORE update, but no availability date is available.
AxoTools is not a 3D application, but tries to assist illustrators in achieving a 3D look the best it can. Simple shapes are pretty straightforward, but complicated shapes can wind over and under each other like an Escher drawing. In that case, AxoTools evaluates the paths and makes its best guess on correctly stacking the pieces.
When a path is extruded, AxoTools creates closed paths for fillable areas and open paths of multiple stroke weights. To make things more easily edited, the pieces are organized into groups. In the Layers panel, you can expand these groups to find the pieces you may want to edit. Compound paths contain elements nested inside of other elements, so things get a bit more complex.
The front surface is named as a “cap,” and is placed above all of the edge pieces. The edges, which give it depth, are divided into surfaces. Each surface is composed of fillable “panels,” stroked “paths” that follow the original path’s shape, and “connector” pieces for corners that connect the front cap to the rear cap (the rear cap and hidden surfaces may or may not be drawn depending on your Extrude panel settings).
This is not an animation, but a screen recording right out of Adobe Illustrator! Each face of this dodecahedron is a live Transformation object created from the same pentagon shape, with movements and rotations added in the AxoTools Transformations panel.
Sure, it’s unlikely you’ll ever need a shape like this, but we often need art rotated away from our usual three planes. This demonstrates how, whether it’s a skylight, an instrument panel, or graphics on a milk carton, that task is now a whole lot easier!
You can download this file from the link at the end of this post and with AxoTools installed, even in demo mode, examine how this crazy “disco ball” was built.
Each facet is made from a pentagonal path, turned into a live object that specifies its movements and rotations. The orientation is set relative to the current AxoTools projection, so in the AxoTools Projection panel you can adjust the settings with the dial controls to see the dodecahedron rotate as a unit in real time!
When Ron Kempke built this, he used his math superpowers to determine the angles and offsets.
But fear not! For those who would rather not break out a scientific calculator, it’s possible to let Illustrator do most of the heavy lifting. First, make a copy of your base pentagon to create some guide art. Imagine the dodecahedron as two “tulip” shapes placed face-to-face. We know that the shape across the “shoulders” of the tulip would be equal to five segments equal to the width across the base pentagon. That will allow us to draw a top view of the shape.
The offset from the base pentagon to the section at the shoulders tell us the foreshortening of the slope of each “pedal.” Draw vertical guides this distance apart. Draw a vertical line from the base of the pentagon to the height of its shoulders. Rotate this line until its width matches the offset distance in the top view. Measure the angle of this line (26.56° in this case) for use in the Transformation objects later. Draw a horizontal guide at the top of this rotated line.
Copy the pentagon and rotate the copy 180°, then position it so each pentagon’s tip and shoulders match as shown below. Select the pentagons and scale them vertically, using the foreshortened height of the rotated line as a guide.
This art, of course, isn’t a real side view, since the upper and lower pieces would be horizontally scaled and sheared differently. We’re only interested in finding the foreshortened vertical dimensions in order to create our Transformation objects.
With these principles in mind, click the link below to download Ron’s file and examine the settings in each piece.
Those of you who have had Graffix plugins for Adobe Illustrator for a while know that version updates and even new features are almost always free. In fact, every update since 2014 has been free, and although some significant updates are currently in progress, none are planned to require an additional payment.
When new features, improvements to existing features, or just addressing issues that occasionally arise, I like to get fixes and improvements in the hands of users as soon as practical.
On the other hand, I realize that unzipping the download, then navigating through the file system to place the plugin in Illustrator’s Plug-ins folder is a hassle. Illustrators have too much to do to be saddled with busywork like this!
When I rebuilt my plugins using Hot Door’s CORE libraries in 2014, I was encouraged that it had built-in almost all the tools I needed to automatically install updates (key word: almost). A fellow developer recently alerted me to an approach that finally made the last piece of this process possible. Some of the plugins available for download now have the auto-install system added, and the rest of the plugins will be updated as well in the near future.
When the new plugins fetch an update, they will automatically install it, and move the “read-me” doc file to a “Graffix plugins” folder located in your Documents folder. I only wish I could have enabled this sooner!
IMPORTANT UPDATE: The auto-install, I found out too late, only works reliably on Mac systems, and then only when the Plug-ins folder has its permissions set to read/write for everybody. Current plugins test for the known limits and, if necessary, will send a link to your browser to download as it used to. If you’ve already downloaded a plugin with auto-install, you’ll have to manually download an update from the site. I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. Please remember, I’m just an illustrator like you who’s figured out how to write plugins, and that limited experience sometimes shows.
Update: now with AxoTools 16.2, there’s an easier way!
Ron Kempke, who wrote the math behind AxoTools, has provided a follow-up to this post on using an auxiliary view in AxoTools, with these steps on taking it a step farther. Even with the oblique plane rotated at all three axes, we can still construct an auxiliary view and establish an axis for extruded art on that plane.
In this example, we have a simple cube with one corner removed. With the three sides projected, the triangle shape practically draws itself, but a problem arises when other objects need to be added that match this orientation.
Here, Ron walks us through this process using the AxoTools Projection panel along with Illustrator’s built-in Scale and Rotate tools.
To start, we need to do some construction drawing in the orthographic top view. You’ll probably want to work on copies of these views. Select the long side (hypotenuse) of the triangular shape in the top view. Copy and paste it, then rotate it 90°. Position this line to divide the shaded triangle at its right-angle corner at the corner of the cube. Use this as a guide to draw the red guide triangle.
Align the right angle of this triangle with the upper left corner of the right side view. Rotate the top view to match the guide triangle, as shown in the blue square below, then project this to the axonometric top view.
Use Illustrator’s Measure tool to measure the angles of this projected shape. Enter these values into the Axis fields of the Projection panel, which will then become a new (but temporary) axonometric view. The top face of the preview proxy cube in the Projection panel should resemble the rotated cube in your art. Note that these values are for this example only; your angles will certainly be different. If you now project the left and right ortho views, it should resemble the blue cube shown above.
Select the right orthographic view and scale it so that the shaded triangle matches the width of the red guide triangle.
Now on this foreshortened right side view, rotate a copy of the angled line -90° as shown. Here it’s colored green to distinguish it from red guide lines. Remember that having entered new values into the Projection panel axis fields, your projection now matches the blue cube shown below. Project the new guides into your axo view.
Measure the angle of the green guide line that represents the perpendicular, and save that value for later. Rotate the oblique surface and red guide lines so that the perpendicular is perfectly vertical.
If you’ve entered the new X and Z axis angles correctly, the top surface of the preview cube will be oriented at the same angles as your red guide lines.
You now have an orthographic (top-left) view of your oblique surface! Add your additional details. It’s worth noting that the red guide line at the top corresponds to the upper edge of the surface on the top view.
Now extrude any objects on this surface, along the vertical axis. You can do so visually with the Extrude tool, or numerically with the Extrude panel (be sure to check the Foreshorten option). If you have a left or right view showing the depth of the objects on this view and you’ve placed reference points for these views, you can drag by reference in the side view and the depth will be measured and foreshortened for you. (If you extrude a shape on this surface numerically from the Extrude panel, you should be aware that normally objects at this angle recede, so you’ll have to rotate it 180°.)
If you’re using reference points here, remember to redefine them in your standard ortho views when you’re finished with these details.
Finally, set your projection back to isometric or whatever projection your overall illustration used.
In review, the basic steps are:
Find the plane’s perpendicular from the top view.
Define a projection along the top perpendicular to find the plane’s side perpendicular, which is also its extrusion axis, from a side view.
Spin the oblique surface so that its extrusion axis becomes vertical.
Define another projection based on the rotated guides and un-project the oblique surface.
You now have an ortho view of your oblique surface that you can add details to, and save for future reference.
Project a top-left axo view and extrude any objects on that surface.
Spin the oblique surface back to its original orientation.
Many thanks to Ron Kempke for this useful and fascinating exercise!
Update: Now with AxoTools 16.2, there’s an easier way!
Every technical illustrator, it seems, eventually runs into a situation where a surface they’re drawing doesn’t exactly match the top, left, or right views. If one edge of a rectangle that defines that surface coincides with the X or Z axis, there are at least two ways to project that angled face. Let’s say you want to add a dial or knob to this control panel.
In conventional drafting, you’d draw what’s called an auxiliary view for the tilted panel, then mathematically calculate the locations of the panel’s elements in the axonometric (or isometric) view. One way might be called the “rotate and force-fit” method.
Here’s a sequence of steps that shows how that works, and illustrates the reason those four “Rotate” and “Unrotate” items were added to the flyout menu.
Of course, the axis of the ellipse is at a different angle than any axis, so here’s a method that uses axonometric logic to reverse-engineer the projection of that surface in order to use the Extrude tool to accurately draw the cylindrical shape of the knob.
After this technique, be sure to restore your axonometric projection to the previous settings!
New tools are currently in progress for AxoTools, but until they’re available, this should help you get through some of those unusual situations.
AxoTools is not a 3D application, but tries to assist illustrators in achieving a 3D look the best it can. Simple shapes are pretty straightforward, but complicated shapes can wind over and under each other like an 
On the other hand, I realize that unzipping the download, then navigating through the file system to place the plugin in Illustrator’s Plug-ins folder is a hassle. Illustrators have too much to do to be saddled with busywork like this!
