Shape effect reorder function

madrobot · Post by **madrobot** » Wed Apr 29, 2009 5:05 am

It would be great to be able to restack your shape effects.
At the moment you have to manually overwrite them,
and as you can't copy/paste and shape effect level,
its a fiddly pain in the backside.

When you take into account that the same effects in
a different order can give a very different result,
this makes sense.

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Wed Apr 29, 2009 10:13 am

I don't know if this helps very much but you could put at least two effects in two named styles. Then stacking order can be changed. There are two spots on a shape for a saved style. The order here is the same as any other shape effect applied directly to a shape.

This does limit the number of effects you can use on one shape though since only those two named styles can be swapped. By using named styles you could have up to 6 effects on one shape (two effects for each style plus two more for the shape itself. throw in effects for the stroke and that's 3 more effects in the bunch.

)

Sadly I have actually done this on purpose.

-vern

madrobot · Post by **madrobot** » Wed Apr 29, 2009 11:51 pm

Thanks Vern, I think it's time I bit the bullet
and look into styles. It just seems like clumsy
implementation to me. That's my excuse anyway.
Maybe I'm just lazy.

synthsin75 · Post by **synthsin75** » Thu Apr 30, 2009 12:06 am

It would be nice though if the effects settings weren't reset with every change. If the settings could be the same as the last, like most tool options. That would make it easier to swap effect levels.

If the effects had more scripting access, a lot more could be done.

madrobot · Post by **madrobot** » Thu Apr 30, 2009 12:29 am

I take it that the scripting isn't currently
open enough to allow for development
of a seperate shape effect utility and
implementation?

I'm guessing it's not.
If scripting's opened up - whoooo....

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Thu Apr 30, 2009 10:52 am

As far as I know and I haven't experimented with it much with scripting, there are only two effects accessible with the script interface, soft edge and shading. They can be applied to a style but I don't see a way to check if a fill has an effect which is a problem

I think what is needed for better script access might be "effect constants" like key channel constants, masking constants etc. Then you could access the effect of a style, store it in a variable with settings, then a tool could change the order.

Right now this does not exist. Keep your fingers crossed.

---

On the topic of named styles... they kick arse. Big time. They save tons of time if you use the same styles over and over. Even if the only thing you save in them is a color value they are very useful. Changing a color globally by changing a single style is great. Changing all the stroke widths by changing a single style. that is the first thing I always create in a new project, a default stroke style. I apply it to everything. Then I can quickly change the stroke attributes in the style (variable widths on points can't be saved in a style unfortunately).

-vern