From the course: Illustrator 2021 Essential Training

Compound paths and shapes - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator 2021 Essential Training

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Compound paths and shapes

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- [Instructor] Drawing by construction is one of the most popular drawing methods in Illustrator. And with that, you take different shapes, and you combine them in some way, either by adding them together or subtracting them from each other to create whole new things. And the most popular way of doing that is using compound shapes. And I'll just show you what that is with this file here. I'm going to bring this smaller circle on top of this larger circle. I'm going to select both. And in my Pathfinder options here, I'm going to choose click to unite. And you see, they become one new path, like so. I'll undo that a couple of times to move them separately apart. And what we're going to look at rather than the Pathfinders, which is in the next movie here, what we're going to do is look at compound paths, a slightly different thing. So that's joining things together, still making a single path. And that's required for some processes such as, for example, cutting vinyl for signage. That's somewhere where you need lots of compound paths. But they're slightly more complex in a couple of ways. Let me select the two objects here, okay, and I'll join them together, making a compound path using Command + 8. Okay, that would be Control + 8 on Windows. And you'll see that, differently to the Pathfinder, which took the top fill color and applied it to both, this has taken the bottom fill color here. Now, I'm going to double-click onto this shape to go into isolation mode. Then I'm going to take the small circle here and bring that in like so on top of this shape. And this is where it starts to get really fun because the compound paths have positive and negative areas. Now, you might well think, okay, if we got another shape, so I'll just cut this one to the clipboard, double-click to go into isolation mode, and then paste. Now it has taken on that color. And you might think, okay, that makes perfect sense then that that is positive, so positive, negative, positive. Okay, what I'm going to do is come out of that, pick up this smaller shape here, cut that to the clipboard, double-click, and then paste that in, take on the color again, but it doesn't quite work that way. Well, it does, but there are two rules in Illustrator that determine how this is going to work on this path. And to access them, you need to use this, the Attributes panel, which is one of those that really is more at the expert end, quite often, usage for this. With other panels, you would find it here in the Window menu. Okay, and what's happening here is, at the moment, it's using the default rule in Illustrator for combining paths. And that's called the non-zero winding rule, which is a great phrase to throw out when you're in company of novice Illustrator users, 'cause it sounds really, really good, although it's not. And if you want to dig into it, go ahead and do that in your own time. Here are the two methods. So this is the non-zero winding fill rule here. Okay, and this is the even-odd fill rule. Now, if I click that, you'll see, suddenly, I get my negative shapes in here, as I would expect. So if you're creating compound paths, and you're not getting the anticipated result, get the Attributes panel open. Okay, and try changing the method here between even-odd and non-zero winding to see if that resolves it. Finally, if you need to break a compound path open, what you can do is right-click on it and choose Release Compound Path. And then all of those elements are brought back to their original shapes, but they do retain the fill of the compound path. For a lot of people though the Pathfinder is the route to go down to create your shapes and the shape builder tool, and we'll be looking at those in this chapter.

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