[AD] How to apply a mask/clip to crop destructive?

[MmmMaarten]

Hi everybody,

I believe this will turn out to be a feature request, 'cause I can't find anything on destructive cropping. But just to be sure I post this one on the question forum first. I might be missing a feature here.

I find myself looking for ways to destructive crop vector illustrations to bounds. By lacking a better feature for this I use the boolean tools everytime now, but that's pretty time consuming and far from efficient to do this. I know there are some ways to mask and crop things in a non-destructive way, but for the projects I do I need this to be destructive.

What I am looking for is actually a way to 'apply' a mask or crop. I would be surprised if there is no feature for this, but I can't find one either. Anybody knows how to apply a mask/clip so the paths are changed destructively only leaving the wanted result?

The way I do it now is just way too much work for a thing I do so often and not the nicest thing to do.

Thanks!

 

[gdenby]

Hi, wigglepixel,

The crop tool is not destructive unless the layer is rasterized, AFAIK.

I'll suggest a slightly different method that will reduce the repetitions a little.

Draw a rectangle that encompasses all the vectors that need cropping. Copy it to the clipboard. Select a vector item, and intersect it w. the rectangle. Select another vector, and paste. The rectangle will be placed above it in the layer panel, so the lower one's attributes will be preserved. Intersect those. Etc. At least the primary rectangle is only made once, and re-used. 

 

[MmmMaarten]

20 minutes ago, gdenby said:

Hi, wigglepixel,

The crop tool is not destructive unless the layer is rasterized, AFAIK.

I'll suggest a slightly different method that will reduce the repetitions a little.

Draw a rectangle that encompasses all the vectors that need cropping. Copy it to the clipboard. Select a vector item, and intersect it w. the rectangle. Select another vector, and paste. The rectangle will be placed above it in the layer panel, so the lower one's attributes will be preserved. Intersect those. Etc. At least the primary rectangle is only made once, and re-used. 

 

Hi @gdenby, thanks for your reply. yes, some things are only possible after rasterizing, so I can't use them, because I need everything to be vectors.
Something like your advise is actually what I do right now. I do it a little slower and easier in the video just to show the problem, but I tried lots of different things. What I do most now is adding a rectangle, than duplicate that layer a lot of times and than use this repetition: select a rectangle-layer together with a layer I want to crop and than hit the right boolean button. So it 'eats' the rectangles up until they are all gone and the layers are cropped. But it's just so incredebly inefficient, timeconsuming and also causing errors, because sometimes there are very small details that are easy to forget to crop. And I need this feature a lot; most of the time I have a lot of layers that needs to be cropped in a single file. And that's not fun to do like this.

I don't like these manual repetitional edits. They are taking way too many time and don't make me feel very creative, more like a robot. I would be very happy if there was a decent cropping tool that we could apply.

Maybe somebody knows a way to go around this repetive workflow, but I'll probably move this one to the feature request forum.

Thanks again for your response!

[Mithferion]

The only thing that can be done to reduce the time needed for this task is to creare a rectangle in the size and position you require, and then create as many duplicates of it as you need. In your video, you create one rectangle at a time, so at least it'd reduce the time and steps a little bit.

Best regards!

[Guest]

Hello wigglepixel,

I don't know if this is convenient for you, but you can select all the shapes you want to cut, make a compound of them (Boolean operation "Add" by holding down the "Alt" key), the shape obtained is then only one color. Then draw a very thin line through the compound shape, keep it selected and do "Expand Stroke". 
Select the set (shape and line) and do a "boolean" "Divide" operation, the different original shapes take their respective colors.
Select the parts to be deleted without forgetting the different parts of the line.

[gdenby]

Good work. I forgot all about what would happen w. a compound object.

[Guest]

4 minutes ago, gdenby said:

Good work. I forgot all about what would happen w. a compound object.

Hello, Gdenby,

This is indeed one of the interesting sides of compounds!

[MmmMaarten]

1 hour ago, reglico said:

Hello wigglepixel,

I don't know if this is convenient for you, but you can select all the shapes you want to cut, make a compound of them (Boolean operation "Add" by holding down the "Alt" key), the shape obtained is then only one color. Then draw a very thin line through the compound shape, keep it selected and do "Expand Stroke". 
Select the set (shape and line) and do a "boolean" "Divide" operation, the different original shapes take their respective colors.
Select the parts to be deleted without forgetting the different parts of the line.

I'm sorry to spoil it guys, but although it seems like a good solution at first, the result of that is still non-destructive. Look at your end-result: in the end you've got 1 group called 'curve'. The group is called 'curve', because it's a curve masking the original curves which are there as childs. So inside that 'layer' you still find the original shapes. They are just non-destructively masked by an additional curve.

To demonstrate this in a video:

@gdenby

1 hour ago, Mithferion said:

The only thing that can be done to reduce the time needed for this task is to creare a rectangle in the size and position you require, and then create as many duplicates of it as you need. In your video, you create one rectangle at a time, so at least it'd reduce the time and steps a little bit.

Best regards!

Thanks, but that's exactly what I do everytime now, as I wrote in my previous post.

Maarten

[Guest]

1 hour ago, wigglepixel said:

They are just non-destructively masked by an additional curve.

You're right, I didn't notice this behaviour that doesn't happen when it's a single object.

[MmmMaarten]

10 hours ago, reglico said:

You're right, I didn't notice this behaviour that doesn't happen when it's a single object.

No problem, thanks for trying to help