Getting stuck in the boolean operations



  • I will email you over the file itself in a minute - I'm running into issues getting the green parts to be cut out of the black beneath it. Ideally, I'd grab the black background solid piece and the green parts sitting over-top and hit merge, or divide in order for the green parts to "cookie-cutter" their shape into the black below. Instead it only does it on one part and not the others... then if I use merge, the open hole I previously made fills in... and I can see the lines sort-of cut into the black below it, but I can't do anything with them to remove it from the piece.
    This first video is my attempts to get the green shapes sitting over top to be "cut out of" the black whole shape below

    This second video, I copied the vectors from VS and pasted them into Illustrator CS6 and in a couple simple moves, was able to use the illustrator "merge" boolean o accomplish a clean cut

    The result I can get in Illustrator, just grabbing two overlapping vectors, I should be able to hit merge or divide and get clean simple cuts as I did there...
    I may have missed a step. I did check to see if the objects were grouped for example, in case that mattered, - they were not.
    I did another test using basic shapes that i arranged to allow for a negative space in the middle.
    I was curious about a few things - first, would the union operation turn all the shapes into one and fill in the negative space (this is what Illustrator's union tool does for better or worse) I'm not sure because the union option deleted a section of the rectangles while acting normally and creating one unified shape with the rest.
    Is union supposed to be like "scorched earth" and just turn everything into one giant simple shape? Where even the negative spaces get filled in? Or is it supposed to respect negative spaces and do the same otherwise to what Illustrator's does?
    I went backward to the initial shapes again and this time hit "merge" and it seemed to act as it should this time. (this made me wonder why it did not act the same way in my first example)
    I then went back and this time did the divide option - and that did not go as planned as well


  • administrators

    @Boldline There seems to be an error in the new union / exclude method. I will fix this ASAP.
    In the first example, the black arrow shape already contains the green shape, and exclude (or divide) is not handled correctly. Move away the green shape, select the black arrow shape and uncheck the Object -> Content -> Winding Fill option, to have the hole in the shape.



  • @vectoradmin
    I'm glad you were able to find the error. I send you examples and videos as I try the merge/union/divide, etc operations but I also don't want to send you the same issues if you've already found the issue in the first.
    Also that makes sense about the winding fill option. Earlier in that project I had a section that did not fill properly and I switched the winding fill to the other to get it to fill properly.

    In this example from today - I was trying to do a quick fill of the tomato since it was only an outline and the inside was mostly empty space. When I do this in Illustrator, I use the live paint option occasionally, or I more commonly stick a filled object behind the tomato, grab both and merge them and then un-group and delete the exterior part that is not needed.

    The merge result this time was interesting because it gave me a stacked layer set of the back fill, the interior fill etc.. that could be a useful tool - but I don't imagine it's what the merge here was intended for.


  • administrators

    @Boldline If there is a file with the tomato example, it would help replicating the issues. Thanks!



  • @vectoradmin sent! thank you! This stuff is the bread and butter of what I do each day. I appreciate you working so diligently to get the issues worked out.


  • administrators

    @Boldline These issues were fixed in build 1.0.048