Working with high numbers of curves/nodes in AD

[ianrobertdouglas]

I'm on a 2013 Macbook Pro with 2.6 GHz Intel Core i7 processor and 16GB of RAM. Not the best, but not the worst.

 

I'm trying to work with background patterns and half-tone. Two examples: one originally made from stroke lines, expanded (leading to many thousands of connected nodes); the other a half-tone image.

 

With the lines, I want to get rid of some part of it destructively. The vector is very heavy because of the number of nodes in it. I don't need everything, but wanted to retain the pattern. Vector cropping doesn't reduce the file size. Deleting nodes changes the pattern if I go too close to the selection I need.

 

Absent a true vector erase brush, what is the solution?

 

On the half-tone, I face a problem consolidating the selection I want to keep. The full vector has 15,000+ curves. Running Boolean addition on these goes nowhere. Even an hour and a half later, AD is seemingly still working on it, but I suspect it's not.

 

Even cutting down to 4600 curves and trying to add these together in one layer fails.

 

Incidentally, when I'm in AD, trying to do this addition, AD uses 100% of my CPU processes. When out of AD, say when I flip to another program, this drops significantly.

 

Is AD working in the background? Is it best to remain in AD and just go have a coffee if trying to add large numbers of curves together?

[gdenby]

No real answer. Do you absolutely need to expand the strokes? Looking at some of my much less complex files, the size can triple between simple strokes and the same expanded.

 

I've had a few instances where I thought AD was hung. I'm running an i5, which has 6 cores running at 3.3 GHz. After a few times, doing one of the booleans on maybe 1100 curves, I realized it was just a processing load. I did go and make coffee. Typically that takes 2 - 3 minutes. Given the differences between the machines and the curve count, I'd guess 2 hours would be a reasonable time to do the union.

[ianrobertdouglas]

Thanks for responding.

 

Do you absolutely need to expand the strokes?

 

Good question. I was trying to be neat. I'm using that background pattern within another shape, and it's only about 1/20th of the size. Even using artboards, I didn't want the extra passing over into the final file for the client. 

 

Given the differences between the machines and the curve count, I'd guess 2 hours would be a reasonable time to do the union.

 

Indeed, it didn't appear obviously hung. No spinning beach ball, which is usually a giveaway. I was curious why the CPU increased if I went back to AD from another. app Would AD work slower, on lower CPU resources, if put in the background?

 

For now, I abandoned both tasks. But it would be good to know in general how best to work with large numbers of curves in the future.

 

I guess the other option is just working through these tasks in Illustrator. Not sure about trimming unexpanded strokes, however.

[gdenby]

It seems reasonable that shifting to another app would slow AD's operation. AD operates very much in real time, sort of like a video game. I would suppose shifting to another app, especially one that might some shared resource, or need lots of real time input, would decrease AD priority.

 

As a btw, I mucked around making a much simpler set of lines, just 200, expanded those, expanded again, and then did a boolean add. I had the activity monitor open, and briefly, I had a number of 104% CPU usage!? I looked at the CPU load window, and saw that doing a similar process again had the User CPU load jump to about 30. After I selected the object, which was 800 circle curves added, and went to use the node tool, and zoomed in about 500%, user cpu load went above 40%. I  also noted that even simple things, like scrubbing the stroke width slider back and forth would greatly increase the CPU usage. Clearly not much of a mathematical process, but display update seems to use up quite a lot of CPU.

 

Oh, and I tried working in outline mode, wondering if the drawing routine was less intensive. Made 360 intersecting squares, added them together, then Selected all nodes and used the corner tool on all at once. User CPU load went to nearly 50% on the bottom graph, and the CPU % column went above 250% Definitely had a pizza wheel at that point.