Using Adobe Illustrator as a Desktop Client

Connecting to Adobe Illustrator

You can connect a ShapeDiver model on the platform with Adobe Illustrator using the ShapeDiver Client Application. Illustrator can only be selected in the client application if the software is already running on your local system (in the other case, you will be prompted to start an Illustrator session before trying again).

Once Illustrator is selected in the client, it can be activated in the model view page of a ShapeDiver model and data can start to be exchanged between the client and the web platform. This process is common to all clients and is detailed in more details in this article: Send and bake data to desktop clients

Supported data types

Getting from Illustrator

We describe in the table below all supported input types that can be defined in a Grasshopper definition and used as inputs when connecting to Adobe Illustrator. For each type, we explain how the Illustrator paths sent to the input are converted to Rhino geometry before being used as inputs of the ShapeDiver model / Grasshopper definition.

ShapeDiver Input Type	Conversion logic
Point	Two corners of the geometric bounds of the path are averaged to return the central point.
Line	The path is converted to a general Nurbs curve whose start and end points are used to define and return a line.
Circle	The path is converted to a general Nurbs curve and a native method in Rhino is then used to evaluate if the Nurbs geometry is a circle. If that succeeds, the resulting circle is returned.
Rectangle	Two corners of the geometric bounds of the path are used to defined and return a rectangle.
Curve	The path is converted to a general Nurbs curve.

Baking to Illustrator

The table below lists all the output types that can be defined in Grasshopper and are compatible for baking to Illustrator from a ShapeDiver application.

Rhino Geometry	Notes
Point3d	Points are plotted as path points. These are not visible in Illustrator unless selected.
Arc ArcCurve	Because Illustrator does not support native arc objects as Shapes and the Bezier conversion does not create a geometrically accurate match. Arcs are converted to Nurbs curves, rebuilt and 4 degrees to increase point count then reduced back to 2 degrees for Illustrator Bezier compatibility.
Circle	The Ellipse Shape item is added to the PathCollection. This creates accurately weighted circles.
Line	End points are added to a path.
Rectangle3d	Because rectangles can be rotated, the rectangle is converted to a polyline, and the polyline method is used to draw the path.
Polyline Polyline Curve	Polylines are drawn as path points without handles in illustrator. This reduces the complexity of the curve and the time to draw them.
NurbsCurve Curve	Degree 2 and 3 curves can be rendered accurately to Illustrator. The weighting of the handle points is changed based on their degree.
Brep	Breps loops are extracted and converted to either Nurbs curves or Circles and added to the compound path.

Supported attribute types

Many of the ShapeDiver reserved attributes are mapped to standard Illustrator properties. This is both true for objects used as inputs of a ShapeDiver model and when baking output objects back to an Illustrator document.

ShapeDiver Attribute	Illustrator Property	Getting from Illustrator	Baking to Illustrator
`plotcolor`	Stroke color of the path.	Colors can be returned in RGB or CMYK, if CMYK this method is used to convert RGB.	A System.Display.Color that is converted to an Illustrator RGB color. If the Alpha value of the provided color is 0, then the Stroked property is set to false, meaning no stroke properties are applied to the path.
`plotweight`	Stroke weight of the path.	A numeric (double) value
`plotpattern`	Defines a dash pattern for the path.	A string containing a list of doubles seperated by commas. Ex “2,4”, “1”,”3,2,1”, or ““ (““ = a solid line); If no value or an empty string is provided, the stroke will be solid.
`fillcolor`	Fill color of the path.	Colors can be returned in RGB or CMYK, if CMYK this method is used to convert RGB.	A System.Display.Color that is converted to an Illustrator RGB color. If the Alpha value of the provided color is 0, then the Filled property is set to false, meaning no fill properties are applied to the path.
`opacity`	Opacity of the path (both stroke and fill).	The ShapeDiver opacity attribute is between 0-1. This is unitized so that it maps to other programs which may have different scales. In Illustrator the values are between 0-100, and is scaled to and from the ShapeDiver attribute.

Custom attributes

At the moment, custom attributes are not mapped to Illustrator properties.

Additional considerations

Drawing order

The drawing order of objects in Illustrator can be controlled by ordering the inputs of a ShapeDiver Output component, as well as the lists and trees of objects sent to each input of the component.

Examples

Documentation in progress!