PURE CHAOS

Once again, Mr. Van Willigen has been busy making some pallatey goodness. Daniel promises that this will be the last new script this year.  (Which hopefully means that we'll see some new stuff from him in January.)  Here we have some very organic looking conglomerations of randomized shapes with lots-and-lots of configurable options. Add it to your arsenal of drawing tools. I bet you could do some cool stuff pairing this with my organify script...

You can download  PURE CHAOS here.  And yes, this time I actually checked the link before posting. :)

Happy holidays all!
-J

I don't know if Daniel is planning to write a scripting book or something, but he's well on his way with the examples he's pumping out.

Check his latest script "Spiral" which does what it says, but with an effluence of  configurable options.  Backwards compatible to CS3.
Rock on Daniel!

-J

Flip an object

This morning, Steve from the UK wrote me and asked me how to run a "reflect x" command on an object using JavaScript.
I assumed this could be solved with a simple command, such as in ActionScript, where you can write "scaleX= -1", but after peeking through the docs, I couldn't find any "scale" properties on the objects.

I found the answer in the matrix object (found on page 99 of the CS5  Javascript scripting reference)
For  convenience, here's an example code to flip every object in your document along the 'y' axis: (reflect x)

if ( app.documents.length > 0 ) {

    // here's the "flip horizontal" magic:
    var totalMatrix = app.getScaleMatrix(-100,100);

    // apply the transformation to all art in the document
    var doc = app.activeDocument;
    for ( i = 0; i < doc.pageItems.length; i++ ) {
        doc.pageItems[i].transform( totalMatrix );
    }
}

cheers,
-J

More from Daniel Van Willigen

While I've been busy playing with Flash and Actionscript, Daniel has been busy writing new and improving existing scripts. Now everything is CS3 compatible. See the link at the bottom of this post for a zip file of everything mentioned here.

Daniel's sent me the boxit script and circleit scripts from last time, and now has some new ones as well. There is starit, smileit, and blowfishit which display the respective critters in purdy geometric arrangements.

He has a cool customizable wave generating script called Totally Twisted.

Also included in the zip is his Trace vector to script which he used to create some of the above scripts. Check out his "blowfishit" script as a cute example.
All of the above lovingly zipped into a convenient bundle for your perusal here.

cheers,
-J

New Scripts from Daniel

New Scripts from Scripting Rock-Star Daniel van Willigen.

Daniel has written two brilliant scripts, boxIt.jsx, and CircleIT.jsx that generate fun "eye-candy", but if you look at his code, it is very instructive and clean as well.

 He has also found a great way to utilize dialogs, which I will be emulating in my future scripts.
If you are a designer, or a coder, I recommend you download and check these out.

I have been so lax in my blog updates, that in the meanwhile, he has written ANOTHER brilliant script that will take any geometry on the page and will EXPORT it as a new JavaScript so you can dynamically create that geometry inside of your new script.

Without further ado... Check it..

Oh yeah, I wrote something simple too, check the updates on my scripts page. :)


best,
-J

News

No new scripts from me today, but a lot of cool info.

After a brief email volley with Nathaniel Kelso, I checked out Kelso's Tweet's and he's found some killer posts that I want to remember, so I'm putting them here. Hopefully you might find some value as well.

If you want to export artboards as pngs check this cool  link at hicks design.

Scripting tip here for storing script settings or information in the doc or prefs file, 
Both app and document in CS3 have a  insertLabel() and extractLabel() see the details here.

If you're a fan of EditPlus, Adam Pocs has submitted JS4AI syntax files. Check out the site to grab the syntax files.

Also from Kelso's tweet's, I found a cool scripting tool called ScriptBay on inTools website. Check it here. I'll be playing with it and will post any interesting interactions that occur. That's it for now. Happy Scripting all.
-J
 

Cool Art

I got an email from Pócs Ádám (RoyalJerry) in Hungary, who has made some cool Deco patterns using Fleurify. I asked how he did it, and he emailed me a step by step on how they were made. Good stuff!

Check it, and the crazy Deco images below...

The procedure:

Illustrator part

• Draw a circle (square, octagon, anything, that looks good and symmetrical considering each axis if you rotate the image with 22.5 degrees)
• Wundes / Fleurify with (mostly every time) more than 100
• Pathfinder / Divide
• Ungroup
• Wundes / ArcTwister (now you have to experiment with it, sometimes undo, then again...)
• Group all
• Apply style: appearance with a 3pt white stroke and a 9pt black one
• Export as PSD (surely you can flatten the image, the PS-part is based on whole layers, not just the illustration outline)

Photoshop part

• Open as RGB and if it is not flat, flatten the image (so that the background would be white against a black illustration)
• Create a layer from the background
• Duplicate it
• Rotate the duplication with 45 degrees
• Set it to difference blend mode

That's all. I sometimes played with a "double-set" -- that means I duplicated the whole layer set in Photoshop once again, merged them, rotated with 22,5 degrees and set its blend mode back to difference.

Jerry has some other cool images on his blog. It's in Hungarian, so I don't know what it says, but I do like the pictures...

cheers,
-J

Good news, exportLayers works on at least Snow Leopard. :)

BTW: Minor bug fix.
The toggle for layer name vs. number was backwards.

The current version posted is correct.
If you downloaded before the 24th just re-download the script.

cheers and happy illustrating,
-J

Export Layers as Images

Hey script kiddies!

I know, I know... It's been a while. Hopefully this will make up for some of the lonely feelings you've had to suffer through.

Behold my newest creation: exportLayers.jsx

It will export as many images as you have layers in an .ai document.

And provides the option for you to process multiple open documents or just the current active document.

You can batch export images like this as PNG, JPG, or GIF with a single click:

just by creating a layer structure like this:

Make sure your static layers are locked.

All unlocked layers will be exported, regardless of visibility.

Layers that are both locked AND hidden will be ignored completely.

....and if that weren't cool enough...

The script also auto-generates a production script into your chosen images export directory, so if you ever need to re-run the batch, just re-open all the same source files, double click the .jsx file in your image export directory, and it will skip the dialog and re-export all the images with the same settings.

Happy Illustrating,

-J