Divide / Intersect Multiple Layers with one shape

[Rabeeto]

Hi,

 

I'm looking to confirm whether there is a relatively straight forward method for destructively intersecting/divide multiple layers (14 for example) using one shape.

 

Currently I can do this by duplicating the shape to the same number of layers there are and carry out the intersect operation 14 times. This can be particularly time consuming however and I believe there must be an easier way.

 

Please note: I do not want to use masks, clipping or export slices as to the best of my knowledge these are not destructive processes. If there is an option use these functions to do what I am looking to achieve then even better!

 

I utlimately want to split a multi layer vector image into multiple horizontal slices with the only shapes that are exported being within the slice boundaries.

[R C-R]

I may have misunderstood what you want, but layering 14 rectangles over one larger rectangle & applying the Intersect geometry operation to all 15 objects at once works like this for me:

(I applied a bitmap fill to the larger rectangle to make the slicing more obvious.)

 

The only trick here is that the larger rectangle must be the bottom object in the layer stack or it won't work -- if it is not then all the layers vanish. I think that should not be necessary for an intersect operation but that just seems to be the way the app works.

 

Anyway, the result is a single "(Curves)" object, so to get 14 separate objects it is only necessary to apply the Divide geometry operation to that object.

[Polygonius]

Hi Rabeeto,

 

I also do not see an easyier way than this by RCR. With "powerduplicate" you get in this 14 shapes with exact the same space between in 2 secondes. Just position one copy relative to the original and hit as you often you need cmd+j (or whatever your shortcut for "duplicate" is).

Group all and do the intersection you like.

If you use mixed shapes (complex patterns), not only rectangles, its maybe a good idea to create templates with some groups of such things and put all groups inside a super-group. Than you can copy/paste whenever you need such a group to your current project.

[Rabeeto]

Thanks for the quick responses guys.

 

I may have not explained clearly to begin with but what I'm looking to do:

 

I am looking slice multiple curves/layers at once so that I end up with what would be several rectangular/shapes that include portions of the layers that are cut by the rectangular boundaries.

I am looking to export all of the horizontal slices and place them back together in a separate program. The reason I would like rectangular slices is that it reduces file size. The program I am using to import the .svg files can only import single files of 15kb at a time.

 

The divide method by RCR does work but it splits up all of the layers into smaller components, which is undesirable (all parts are dividing each other). I only want to divide each layer by the same rectangle, so that I'm left with the same number of layers in the end.

 

You can do this by duplicating the rectangles and cutting each layer individually but this is fairly time consuming.

 

DNRTL version:

 

Can you cut multiple layers at once with a single shape?

 

 

Cheers,

 

Rabeeto

 

 

[v_kyr]

That sounds weird and I'm not sure if I really understand your overall purpose for this. - AFAI understand you here, you have some multi-layerd drawings which you want to split let's say at the layer boundaries into SVG chunks. So if a drawing has 14 layers you want to also have 14 splitted parts of that one, since some other third party app you want to use can only import chunks of max 15 Kb per SVG file.

Well if my above assumption/understanding is correct, then all you want is to split up a drawing into SVG chunks and later then merge these SVG chunks back into the whole drawing. Though I'm not sure what you want the shape (rect shape) then for (?), instead I would just save each layer contents seperately as SVG and don't bother with chunks of shapes.

For the above sketched scenario the most logical step therefor would be, to use indeed the export personas slices functionality, meaning here to convert each layer just into a slice (14 layers = 14 slices) and then to export those slices as SVG file parts. Though you would have to make sure here then, that the layers when exported as SVG slices don't exceed your 15 KB file size limit. - In the other app you would then load up the 14 SVG parts/splits step for step and thus merge the whole drawing back together.