From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

873 The improved Simplify command in Illustrator 2020

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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873 The improved Simplify command in Illustrator 2020

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- Hey, gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now, if you've updated to Illustrator 2020, then you are perhaps aware that it doesn't offer many new features. In fact, it may be the least new-feature-offering version of Illustrator the world has ever known. But what few new features it does offer are pretty swell. Including the much-improved simplify command, which takes a bunch of path outlines that contain way too many anchor points like these path outlines that I created in Adobe Fresco just a few weeks ago, and slims them down to just those anchor points that are actually required. Altogether automatically, and with nothing more than a right-click from you. You know how sometimes we accuse Adobe of feature bloat, adding stuff that just junks up the software? Well, not this time. This is Simplify. All right, so here's that vector-based artwork that I drew in Adobe Fresco running on an iPad. Notice, if I press Command + A or Control + A on a PC that I have a ton of anchor points. And by the way, if you're not seeing those anchor points, that's probably because your bounding box is turned on. And so notice, if I go up to the View menu and choose Show Bounding Box, that I can now see my path outlines, but I can't see those points, which is a real problem for this exercise. And so, if you're having that problem, you want to go up to the View menu and choose Hide Bounding Box in order to reveal all of those anchor points. To see just how many anchor points you have, you can go up to the Window menu and choose Document Info in order to bring up this panel right here. And then click on the flyout menu icon in the top-right corner of the panel and choose Objects. At which point you'll see that I have a total of 72 closed path outlines comprising 5,479 anchor points, which is a lot of points to express what is ultimately a fairly simple piece of artwork. All right so, I'll go ahead and close that panel. And then armed with my black arrow tool, I'll right-click anywhere inside the document window and I'll choose Simplify in order, not to bring up a dialog box, at least not by default. Instead, inside Illustrator 2020 and moving forward we see a single slider bar. Now, at this point, instead of just seeing red anchor points, we're also seeing blue ones. And that's because I have my black path outlines and my colorful ones on different layers. All right, so these icons pretty much tell the story. If you want fewer anchor points, then you want to drag this guy over to the left. At which point, a moment later you'll see the number of points, in my case, 300 points. So instead of more than 5,000 anchor points, I now just have 300. However, I have a lot of gaps between my path outlines, as we can see indicated by these white slivers right here. That's obviously no good. So I'll just go ahead and crank this guy up to the maximum number of points, and that invokes a progress window. And then a moment later I can see that I now have 1,128 points, and I'm not seeing any gaps at all. So even though I have more than a thousand points, that's only about 20% of the points that I had before. Now, if you want Illustrator to do the work for you, you just go ahead and click on this Auto Simplify icon. And again, a moment later you'll see the number of points, 581, notice that. So, about a tenth of the original number. Now, if you'd like a little more control, then just go ahead and click on this More Options icon in order to bring up what looks a lot like the old-school dialog box, except that the options have been renamed. And their purpose has been updated as well. And so, notice this first guy. It's called Simplify Curve. It used to be called Curve Precision. It's that same slider bar that we saw just a moment ago all by itself. Now, Curve Precision used to be measured from zero to 100%. Now you just move this slider widget between minimum and maximum. Next, we have Corner Point Angle Threshold, which varies from zero degrees to 180 degrees. And the idea is, how sharp do your corners need to be to remain either corner or cusp points? So, if you crank this guy all the way up to 180 degrees, then you're going to get way more anchor points, as we're seeing here. And that's because you're asking for more accuracy. But notice, we've only shaved off a few anchor points. So here's the original number, and here's the new number. It's staying up on screen, so you can really tell what's going on. If you crank this guy all the way down to smooth, meaning that you're going to get far more smooth point than before, not only are you going to see a progress window, but you're going to end up with far fewer points. You're also going to get a bunch of white slivers between your various path outlines. But we end up with just 407 points, so we've done a lot of good here. Now, if you want to convert all your segments to straight segments, then just go ahead and turn on this check box here, then you'll end up with a bunch of straight segments. However, because the angle threshold is set to zero degrees, we're also increasing, not decreasing, but increasing the number of anchor points. Were I to take this angle threshold back up to what it was just a moment ago, which was 150 degrees, then we don't have many anchor points any more, but we don't have much in the way of artwork, either. So I'll go ahead and turn that check box off. All right now, a couple of more things. First of all, if you want to see the original path, complete with all their anchor points, then turn on this Show Original Path check box. And in my case, I'm seeing all the original anchor points in bright green, and I'm seeing the new anchor points in red or blue, depending on their layer. I'll go ahead and turn that check box off. Now, obviously if I want to apply my settings, I would click OK, or I could just press the Return key here on a Mac, or the Enter key on a PC. I'm going to cancel out, however, so I can show you how to apply your settings if all you want is that original slider. So I'll go ahead and right-click inside the document window once again, and choose the Simplify command. And that'll bring up that lone slider bar that we saw a moment ago, telling us we've got 581 points. Let's imagine you want to apply what you see. Well, if you press the Return key or the Enter key on the PC, you're going to bring up that dialog box once again. If you just want to apply these settings, then you press the Escape key, and that will go ahead and simplify your art. All right, now I'm going to deselect my artwork by pressing Command + Shift + A or Control + Shift + A on the PC. And as you can see here, not only do we have far fewer anchor points, but we have gaps between our black and colorful path outlines. And so, what in the world do we do about that? Now, if you're a member of LinkedIn Learning, I have a followup movie in which we take those simplified paths and fill things in, so we don't have any gaps. What am I talking about? Watch the movie. If you're looking forward to next week, I'll show you how to posterize colors inside Photoshop, and assign false colors to achieve this mind-bending effect. Turn on, tune in, Deke out.

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