Gear maker

Ronny, good thought. I hadn't checked. But yes I see a lot of beachballs. I'm getting 160 to 200% CPU usage during the screen refresh.

Miguel, I have just uploaded to your dropbox a drawing I am nearing completion on. I am curious if you or one of the other developers can make suggestions on how to improve the performance of AD when doing these. Also included is a video showing how slowly the screen refreshes. Any time I do a zoom in or out or pan I have to wait 10 to 15 seconds for the screen refresh to take place. If I click on one layer then shift click on another I have to be sure to hold down the shift for about 10 seconds otherwise AD disregards the shift was pressed. Once the drawing gets a bit complex I end up having to do sections in separate drawings that are then copied into the main drawing later. The final tweaking after all sections are together is so slow as to be painful, more than 50% of the work time is spent waiting for AD update or accept the next command. Granted my machine being from late 2009 is not the fastest around but there posts in the forum I have read that say this should not be an issue. I added 8GB of RAM but do not see any difference. In the preferences I have played with the performance settings. I upped the RAM Usage Limit to 20GB (I don’t understand how this works seeing as I only have 12GB of RAM… but it will let me go to 64GB). I set the view quality to nearest neighbor. I unchecked dither gradients. Nothing made a change, or at least no change that was perceivable. I have tried removing all noise from shapes. I have tried making all dynamic operations into static. I have reproduced the approximate equivalent to the 3D Effect fx, but it takes 6 layers/masks to do it which probably negates any gain. None of this makes a perceptible speed improvement. I dropped the DPI to 72 which may have sped it up slightly, or maybe it was just that I wished it did. Due to the detail I am usually working at zooms of 500 to 1500%. Which I suppose doesn’t help the refreshes. How can I improve the efficiency of the drawing process, other than making simpler drawings? Thank you.

Thanks for the input Leigh. So this is actually by design? That seems most unusual that AD would have a process to create something that can never be modified.

Sure. Keeping my fingers crossed it won't happen again. Thank you.

Andy, it crashed again. I had made an artistic text then using the Character panel I changed the background and was in the process of changing it again when spinning beachball. I had not yet done a ctrl reset. I have done it now. Crash 10:20:15.txt

Maybe it was never intended, but... I have a drawing that I used a gradient to affect an adjustment layer so that I can control where the adjustment occurs and then taper off the effect. 1. Create a shape with a solid color, I used a medium gray. 2. Attach an adjustment layer to this shape, I used HSL. Give it a noticeable luminosity shift. 3. Click on the adjustment layer's icon to select only it. 4. Select the gradient tool. 5. Using the Opacity on the color wheel, set one of the gradient nodes to 0 opacity. Notice the nice transition for the HSL. 6. Click on another layer, then click back on the adjustment layer. The gradient's effect is easily visible so it's still there. But I can't get the gradient line to show. In the context toolbar it shows there is no gradient. How can I adjust the gradient? The attached drawing has two different instances of this. Beta 1.3.5.5 FYI the reason I did this in the first place is that I had several layers grouped that each had a different gradient. I then wanted to use a gradient to affect the entire group. Attaching a gradient to a group changes the gradient of all children in the group. But adding a gradient to an adjustment layer does not change the gradient in each child. But now I can't edit the gradient. I can delete the adjustment layer and recreate it. I can then make changes as long as I do not leave the adjustment layer. Is this a bug? Test 34.afdesign

Miguel, no I didn't remember exactly what I was doing on each of these. Just suddenly a spinning beachball then AD was gone. So it just did it again. I had drawn a rectangle, stretched a linear gradient across it and then had clicked about a 1/3 of the way from the left on the gradient line to add another point. Beachball for 10 or 15 seconds then crash. Beta 1.3.5.5 Crash 10:19:15.txt

I have had AD crash 3 times in the last 6 days. Before that it hadn't crashed in a long time. The first 2 were using beta 1.3.5.3 and the last 1.3.5.4. They didn't seem to be at any one special time. I'd just be moving or resizing something and suddenly a spinning beach ball, then AD is gone. Each time I had been working for at least a few hours before the crash. Attached are the 3 crash reports. Do these tell you anything that might solve the mystery of why the crash? Crash 10-5-15.txt Crash 10-7-15.txt Crash 10-10-15.txt

Hi MEB, No I didn't use any persona other than draw. I had used outline view mode though. Maybe I clicked on pixel view mode! I bet that was it when I left outline. Thank you. Mike

Is there something that I am unintentionally turning off that causes vector shapes to sometimes pixelate? I zoomed in and out no with change to the pixelation. I closed and reopened the drawing then the pixelation stopped for now. Is there some way to force AD to rerender the vectors?

No problem Mvdarbs. Glad it helped. I had hoped the attached file would fill in the blanks. Mike

Hi Mvdarbs, the main problem is that you are not able to control the fill in an open path. Both paths really need to be closed. The hard part then is to have the 3 paths be as close as possible. The return curve on the lower object layer will be hidden behind the upper layer, so it can almost be ignored. I hope that helps. Door Design1.afdesign

Hi Butrflied. Something like this is the best that I have found AD to do for a gradient along a stroke. You can add colors or a more complex gradient. Hope that helps.

Robert, If I am understanding you correctly I would place all the layers in a group then attach an adjustment layer to the group. You could use an HSL adjustment layer to desaturate them. But instead I would use a Black and White adjustment layer, then any time in the future you can tweak how dark or light each color is portrayed. Hope this helps. Mike

I agree, it's the expand stroke that was the issue with MEB's suggestion. Sometime in the future it will work, just not yet. Thanks again.

Your wife must hate you. I hope you do clean out the microwave after you get done. :D

Alex, very good solution. Just tried it out and it worked quite easily. And I don't have to play with figuring out the geometry. Easy and fairly automatic, what more could I ask for. You are good! I already knew that. Thanks. Mike

Howdy MEB, I need to subtract the sausage shape from the gear so they are openings. I would have to expand the stroke, but then I'd have way to many nodes (I'm annal about minimizing my drawings as much as possible). I'd have to subtract it to use it as a mask. Am I right that I can't subtract an open path stroke? I guess I could use an Erase blending mode. Thanks. Mike

Alex, glad to know it's not just me. It does seem a bit buggy or at least inconsistent. The Break Curve will only operate on one node even if multiple are selected (when you need to do several it would sure be nice to have a hotkey <_< ). I was surprised that the Join did work on multiple node sets. It would be nice if it had only worked well. :huh: That second one, the bump, really threw me because other than an undo it was hard to correct. Thanks for verifying the issues. I hadn't seen reports on exactly these so I figured... By the way can you (or anyone else) come up with an idea of an easy way to create the sausage shapes for drawings like this? I frequently need to make 3 or 4 per gear, or variations on these. The method I use is very involved. I create two circles at the size of the OD and ID of the sausage. Then two smaller circles at the beginning and end of each sausage with a diameter equal to the difference between the ID and OD of the sausage. Then break each of these circles into the arcs needed to create the shape shown in the original question and finally join them back together. I keep thinking there has to be a simpler way but haven't found it yet. I appreciate it. Mike

Chapter 2 on this. I have almost the identical shape in file Test 32. Following the join operation the red node was not joined and is open. When I grab the red node, using the node tool, and give it the slightest wiggle the control handle shoots out resulting in an odd bump. What's causing the control handle to spring out with the slightest wiggle of the node, and it doesn't go back with any movement of the node. Test 32.afdesign

I don't know if this should be a question or a bug. This is a small portion of a large drawing. I have 4 shapes, all arcs created by breaking apart circles. The goal is to combine these into a hotdog shape with a closed path. I had the "Snap to selected curves" on. In the attached Test 31 file I selected all 4 shape layers using the layers panel, then grabbed the upper left node that is repeated on two of the shapes wiggled it to make sure it snapped to the node underneath it. Drew a marque around these two nodes to select them. Then clicked on the Join Curves operation. The 4 shape layers were combined to one. Question 1 How do I know if all 4 sets of connecting nodes have been joined? So that this is a closed path. There's only one red node showing and only one shape remaining. To verify it is a closed path, using the Node tool I selected the 10 visible nodes of the shape using a shift click selection on each. Don't use a ctrl A or a marquee for this test. Then I grabbed one node and drug it. As you can see two nodes didn't join. And one is the upper left node that I had made sure was snapped to the node below it. It is connected but had left a duplicate node, looks like a Close Curve command was used. So out of 8 nodes in 4 sets it looks like: 2 sets were joined, the 2 nodes in each set becoming 1 1 set was combined using a Close Curve that I didn't click, the 2 nodes in the set were joined by a path. 1 set was not joined I really figured only the 1 set selected would be operated upon by the Join command. That's all I wanted at this point. Question 2 thru 4 Why did it even attempt to join nodes that were not selected? Is this a bug or is it supposed to operate on unselected nodes? If this is by design how do we tell AD not to join nodes that we don't want joined? Question 5 Why the inconsistency? I assume the node set that was not joined probably the nodes were not snapped to each other. But the set that I am sure were snapped had a Close done on them not the Join operation I selected. When I have repeated this test using the same file sometimes the two sets that didn't Join swap but I always get the same, 2 joined, 1 closed, and 1 open. Done in AD Beta 1.3.5.3 Test 31.afdesign

Matt, I was just trying out the "User-definable precision for different unit types (in preferences)". What areas does this affect, from what I see it's the x, y, w, & h in the transform panel and the w & h in the document setup. Are there any others? Would it be possible to expand this into the rotate field in the transform panel? Thank you.

MEB that's fantastic. Not sure why it works but it sure could be handy in the right project. This is a keeper. Much easier than I would have thought such would be!

When I press tab in 1.3.5.2 it just goes to full screen, then back again. How do you tab to move from one field to the next?

Wow Ben I hadn't heard of either of those modifiers before. They will be a great help. I guess I should go back to non-Separated Mode so I can see the hint line, but I really prefer Separated for other reasons. As I've said before AD has the best pen and node handling of any program I've used. Thank you for creating this and keep up the good work.