AD tangent snaping??

[SilvaDSGN]

IS there a way to snap tangent circles? i´ve been playing around the snaping option and havent find anything usefull.

[firstdefence]

There is no Tangent snapping per se but I wonder if this would work for you

 

[SilvaDSGN]

Thanks for the repply, i am using that approach, but it isnt exact, even if i snap to object geometry and all of that, it sometimes gets missallign. I´m making circular grid logos, and the fact that there isnt a proper shape builder tool, i am converting to curves, and then adding nodes, then cutting the rest of the nodes.

[firstdefence]

6 hours ago, TikiAles said:

Thanks for the repply, i am using that approach, but it isnt exact, even if i snap to object geometry and all of that, it sometimes gets missallign. I´m making circular grid logos, and the fact that there isnt a proper shape builder tool, i am converting to curves, and then adding nodes, then cutting the rest of the nodes.

Got an example of what you are aiming for?

You can use the transform panel to accurately move objects, just make sure move by whole pixels is turned off in snapping and make sure the numbers in the transform panel are integer numbers (Whole numbers) not fractional.

1. Create a Circle 100px and place it at X:0 Y:0
2. Using Power Duplicate (⌘ + J) or (Alt + Drag)  duplicate object, then edit the location of the duplicated object in the transform panel to X:100 Y:0
   This moves the duplicated circle to the right 100px
3. Use (⌘ + J) again repeatedly to create multiple duplicate objects all moved 100px to the right of the last one.
4. Once you have enough to can select them all, (⌘ + J) and move them down by setting the transform panel X:0 Y:100
5. Use (⌘ + J) again repeatedly to create multiple duplicate lines of the selected objects all moved down 100px

You can do similar things by rotating around a central circle. using the rotation centre of the first object and duplicating it.

There is a cool Open Source app called NodeBox that can generate patterns, it can export to vector formats like SVG. If you want to knock out cool patterns or even animation NodeBox is a good tool to have in your design tool kit.

[SilvaDSGN]

Yeah i do that, but most of the times, the circles are missalign, they are not touching, i hace to zoom really really close to make them touch.

[gdenby]

On 10/2/2018 at 8:05 PM, TikiAles said:

Thanks for the repply, i am using that approach, but it isnt exact, even if i snap to object geometry and all of that, it sometimes gets missallign. I´m making circular grid logos, and the fact that there isnt a proper shape builder tool, i am converting to curves, and then adding nodes, then cutting the rest of the nodes.

I'm not understanding what you are doing. I never needed to use the shape builder tool in Ai, so am unfamiliar w. how it works. 

However, the built in parametric shapes in AD are resized and positioned by their bounding box. They don't really have a fixed geometry till converted to curves w. nodes at specific places relative to the center of rotation. The snapping options won't work very well based on the bounding boxes.

Where are you adding extra nodes? And why do you need to cut the rest of the nodes? Forgive me if I'm seeming dense, but I can't infer what you are trying to do. 

Can you post an image of something that is misaligned, or a file?

 

[SilvaDSGN]

23 hours ago, gdenby said:

I'm not understanding what you are doing. I never needed to use the shape builder tool in Ai, so am unfamiliar w. how it works. 

However, the built in parametric shapes in AD are resized and positioned by their bounding box. They don't really have a fixed geometry till converted to curves w. nodes at specific places relative to the center of rotation. The snapping options won't work very well based on the bounding boxes.

Where are you adding extra nodes? And why do you need to cut the rest of the nodes? Forgive me if I'm seeming dense, but I can't infer what you are trying to do. 

Can you post an image of something that is misaligned, or a file?

 

im tryng to do something like this.

And it works fine, but its not exat, the circles arent touching, i have to zoom in a lot to manually make them touch.

[gdenby]

I went to you tube to watch thru the full vid. As I mentioned, I'm no longer familiar w. AI, and so I could only guess at most of what he was doing, considering there was no commentary. I did notice he had to fuss w. positioning a number of times.

At any rate, I tried moving circles around in a similar matter. Didn't really have much of a problem. 2 things that happened. Sometimes I had the item snapped, but evidently did not cleanly release the mouse button, because when I clicked back on the item just moved, it was slightly offset. Also, as the numbers of objects built up, I noticed that often I was snapping to a center or periphery of the wrong object. I needed to frequently click on the object I wanted to snap to so that it was at the top of the snapping list. 

Here's a file I made doing this. Seems to me most things are positioned properly.

GoldenMess.afdesign