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Using an auxiliary view in AxoTools

Update: Now with AxoTools 16.2, there’s an easier way!

step 1

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.

step Astep B

Step Cstep D

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.

step 2step 3

step 4step 5

step 6step 7step 8step 9

step 10

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.

If you have other tips, please share!

Educational discounts

Photo ©2020 Matt Johnson https://www.behance.net/MATTJIPHON5187

Schools and colleges may be eligible for a significant discount on the Productivity Pack set of plugins. For example, the University of Wisconsin would qualify for at least one free corporate license covering 25 students across all UW campuses in the state. A private school such as Marquette University High School would qualify for at least one studio license covering 10 students at their Milwaukee campus at 50% off.

To apply, simply fill out the form on the main menu at Support > Educational Discount.

Graffix Educational Discount

Thank you to all of the instructors who give so much and help so many.

ToolShed adds Transform tool

One of my favorite tools in Adobe Illustrator is the Free Transform tool, but it does have a few quirks in more recent versions of Illustrator. Say you have a shape made of two rectangles, one of which is rotated 90° from the other, and both rotated some random small amount. With one rectangle selected while using Adobe’s Free Transform Tool, all is well.

Now select the second rectangle and the bounding box is no longer rotated with the selection.

With ToolShed’s new Transform tool, the bounding box is always rotated to match the topmost object, so you can transform these rectangles as though they were one object. One way around this would be to use the Square Up plugin to square the objects along their dominant axis, but that’s now an unnecessary step.

If you press the shift key while rotating, ToolShed’s Transform tool will rotate only the bounding box, which makes it easy to stretch your art along any angle you wish!

Using Adobe’s Free Transform tool, I often grab the handle on a side to stretch it a bit taller or wider, but then it goes all cattywompus. Using the Free Transform tool on more recent versions of Illustrator requires us to first lock proportions by clicking an icon in another tiny palette that, it seems, is always hidden behind other panels. In addition, grabbing a corner to rescale it often seems to rotate the art instead of scaling it. Ain’t nobody got time for that! ToolShed’s Transform tool doesn’t skew and doesn’t rotate from a corner, so for most purposes, you can work more quickly and with fewer surprises.

Remember, you can download ToolShed and try it out with a thousand trial uses that don’t expire before you have a chance to seriously test it. They don’t expire at all!

 

New! ServerLock for Illustrator users in workgroups

ServerLock is here…

ServerLock dialog
ServerLock is a plug-in for Adobe Illustrator working from a shared server. If you open a file someone else already has open for editing, you’ll be presented with a dialog telling you who is currently editing the file and when it was opened. You’ll be given options to cancel the open, view the document, or assume ownership of the lock and its associated Illustrator document.

It’s currently available for Illustrator CC 2015.3 and 2017 only.

Whatever happened to…

If you’ve been using Graffix plugins for a while, you may have noticed a few of them are missing from the current lineup.  I’ll explain why you shouldn’t miss them. The story behind the apparent demise of the Proof Block plugin is explained in this post. There’s actually a much better way to accomplish what this plugin did, so it would actually be a disservice to continue to offer and encourage the use of this plugin (albeit, as Obe Wan said, “from a certain point of view”).

Another is Arrowheads. Again, there’s now a better way to do this, as explained in this Adobe blog. To add the white halo, I just apply a graphic style that adds a white stroke behind the black, offset a bit to the upper right. Rather than offsetting the highlight, you may want to just use a heavier stroke to apply equal white all the way around.

The last to disappear is the Trackplan Tools plugin. I wrote this one specifically for use at my day job, and given it was so specialized, I’ll apologize to its four users for taking it off the list.

Over the past few years, there have been many times I’d wished I had another plugin to do some task. Now that I again have the time and tools to write current-version AI plugins, I’ll be adding them. Those who already bought the Productivity Pack will find new plugins  automatically added to their suite of licenses.

Thanks for your support. I promise more plugins are coming soon.

Select Menu for CC

Buried not-too-deeply in Adobe’s SDK (Software Developer’s Kit) is a list of pre-defined art object types. While some were included in Illustrator’s Select > Object menu, many more were not. It seemed useful to select the other object types, as well, and objects such as paths had properties that were easily obtained and often helpful to select within an illustration. In that spirit, I wrote Select Menu plugin and, given that it was relatively simple to build and applicable to casual users, I’d make it available for free.

It’s not always clear though, what each object type represents, so please understand than some of these choices are simply passed along to you to use to the extent that Adobe uses them when creating their digital form of your artwork. For example, if you use the Shaper tool in CC 2017, you’ll see in the Layers Panel that a Shaper Group has been created. That object type isn’t in the list, though, so finding them would involve examining every object in the document and examining its structure and properties to select those that fit the definition of a Shaper Group. I hope to find enough data on Shapers, Envelopes, and other objects to add them to the menu, so updates are likely in the foreseeable future.

Illustrator CC added Point Text Objects and Area Text Objects, so Select Menu adds them for CS6 users as well. In addition, it adds the following 27 items for everybody:

  • Legacy Text Objects
  • Path Text Objects
  • Guides
  • Paths
  • Open Paths
  • Closed Paths
  • Filled Paths
  • Unfilled Paths
  • Stroked Paths
  • Unstroked Paths
  • Dashed Paths
  • Undashed Paths
  • Compound Paths
  • Styled Art
  • Unstyled Art
  • Opaque Art
  • Transparent Art
  • Symbols
  • Groups
  • Live Objects
  • Gradient Meshes
  • Raster Art
  • Placed Art
  • Graphs
  • Plugin Art

I hope the menu is as helpful for you as it has been for me. If it fails to select an object you feel it should, please copy that object into a separate Illustrator document and send it to me as a bug report. If I can find the problem, I’ll fix it.

The topic of item selection can be taken much farther, though, so if you want a real selection power tool, you’ll probably not find one better than Hot Door’s NitPicker plugin, which I find indispensable in addition to Select Menu.

Download Select Menu

Concatenate CC: 20th anniversary edition

It’s hard to believe it was 20 years ago that I first wrote the Concatenate plugin to join lines from imported CAD files. In all these years, Concatenate has never seen a price increase or a charge for a compatibility upgrade. Since the CS6-CC version is completely rewritten for Illustrator CC from a new library, it will be treated as a new product, but at the original 1997 price. Improvements are already planned for it so updates are imminent, but since it’s as functional as the original it seems best to make it available to people to add to their CC toolset as I’ve added it to mine. For a limited time, you can take advantage of a 50% discount with the coupon code shown on the product page.

Other plugins will be arriving very soon, as well.

Thank you for your support and encouragement over the years!

Concatenate CC for Mac and Windows