Issue with adding fills together

[Boldlinedesign]

When I grab these individual fill pieces to merge them together with the boolean operation "Add", it turns them into an outline - . Most of the time this works just fine, but why in some cases might this result occur? thanks!

[gdenby]

Booleans always close open curves, and take on the attribute(s) of the lowest in the level hierarchy.

[Alfred]

It would be easier to work out what’s going on if we could see the nodes, but there’s clearly something weird going on with some of them.

[Boldlinedesign]

Great help so far - thank you. I can see now there's an open line. I added an image that shows the nodes for that same area - and then another pic of the "debris of nodes" I get when I add fills together. 
When I design, I use brush strokes and overlap them intentionally, then expand and divide and delete the excess pieces... but when I merge pieces together again, I often get the extra nodes. So far, the best answer for that has been to divide and then merge again. 

Certainly open to better solutions. 

[gdenby]

Unfortunately, the boolean operations, and where forms have edges that are close together, the operation(s) for many very small objects. Every red dot node means a separate curve. When you do the second divide, those will all detach, and can be trashed fairly easily.

[Alfred]

9 minutes ago, Boldlinedesign said:

When I design, I use brush strokes and overlap them intentionally, then expand and divide and delete the excess pieces... but when I merge pieces together again, I often get the extra nodes.

The problem you’re running into is that the divided pieces butt up against each other with no overlaps. If you manually add overlaps before adding those pieces back together, the issue should go away.

 

 

[Boldlinedesign]

Just to explain better what I am doing - this is what I am creating with the overlapping brush strokes and then expanding and deleting excess and merging what i want to keep, etc. 
This is the same basic operation I was doing in Illustrator and now porting over to AD. 

[Boldlinedesign]

2 minutes ago, Alfred said:

The problem you’re running into is that the divided pieces butt up against each other with no overlaps. If you manually add overlaps before adding those pieces back together, the issue should go away.

 

 

oh interesting - I will try that. I wonder why this is an issue in AD but not in Illustrator?

[Boldlinedesign]

ok the overlap works in many places and helps - thank you - what about areas like this where you get a negative space where there is overlap?

[Alfred]

1 minute ago, Boldlinedesign said:

ok the overlap works in many places and helps - thank you

You’re welcome.

Quote

 - what about areas like this where you get a negative space where there is overlap?

Good question! What problems do you encounter in that scenario?

[Boldlinedesign]

Just now, Alfred said:

You’re welcome.

Good question! What problems do you encounter in that scenario?

In trying to overlap the two pieces that otherwise butt up against each other - its at times, creating that negative space instead of a solid overlap. 

[Alfred]

3 minutes ago, Boldlinedesign said:

In trying to overlap the two pieces that otherwise butt up against each other - its at times, creating that negative space instead of a solid overlap. 

Ah, OK. I think you should be able to solve that by changing the fill mode from ‘Alternate’ to ‘Winding’.

[Boldlinedesign]

7 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Ah, OK. I think you should be able to solve that by changing the fill mode from ‘Alternate’ to ‘Winding’.

thanks for your help on all this - learned a lot today