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

874 Filling in any post-Simplify gaps

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

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874 Filling in any post-Simplify gaps

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- [Instructor] All right, so here we are, looking at the simplified path outlines from the previous movie. However, if you were to zoom in here, as I'm doing now, you will see that even though we've reduced the number of anchor points from 5,479 to just 581, so you have just a few more than 10% of the anchor points we had before, we have a bunch of gaps between our path outlines. And so, what do we do? Well, I'll go ahead and zoom out by pressing ctrl + 0, or cmd + 0 on the Mac, and then I'll go to the Window menu and choose Layers in order to bring up my Layers panel, which is currently hidden, and I want you to notice that I've gone ahead and put the black outlines on one layer, and the colorful path outlines on a layer below. So what we can do, is expand those colorful path outlines in order to fill the gaps and leave the black path outlines alone. And I'm going to do that with the black arrow tool, by selecting any one of these brown path outlines, and then I'll go up to the Select menu, choose Same, and then choose Fill Color. Now we'll go ahead and select all of the brown path outlines as we're seeing here. Next, I have a couple of different options. One is to go ahead and stroke those path outlines, and so if you have your Properties panel up on-screen, then you could go ahead and add a stroke if you like, but you would need to make the color of the stroke the same as the fill color, which takes a little extra work. Instead, what I'm going to do is go up to the Object menu, choose Path, and then choose Offset Path. And notice by default, the offset value is set to 10 points, meaning that we're going to move the path outline outward, all the way around, and I can see what that looks like by turning on the Preview checkbox. And that is going to more than fill in the gaps, at which point, I'll just go ahead and click OK. All right, now I'll do the same thing with the yellow path outlines, so I'll select any one of them, and then I could return to the Select menu, or if you have your horizontal control panel up on-screen, which you can bring up by just choosing Control from the Window menu. Don't choose Control if it has a check mark next to it, by the way, because that will hide the panel. But then, what you can do is just go ahead and click on Select Similar Objects, and that will select all the yellow path outlines like so, then return to the Object menu, choose Path, and then choose Offset Path, we already know that the default value's going to work out just fine, so click OK, and that will move those path outlines out, in order to fill the gaps. Now all we have left is the flesh, so I'll go ahead and click in the face, and then shift + click in the neck, those are the only two flesh-colored path outlines, and now, I will for the third time, go to the Object menu, choose Path, and then choose Offset Path, and I will go ahead and click OK to accept that value. And that does fill in everything, as I can see, if I were to press ctrl + shift + a, or cmd + shift + a on the Mac, in order to deselect the path outlines, and then zoom in, and notice that we have no gaps whatsoever. Now, you might say, "Deke, we really didn't have to go to all that work, did we, "to select the path outlines in various groups, "and then choose Offset Path three times in a row," and you know what? Now that you mention that, you're right. And so what I'm going to do is go to the File menu and choose Revert in order to restore the original version of that artwork, with all of its gaps, and then I'm going to bring up the Layers panel, right here, and I'll go ahead and click in the top right corner of the colors layer, in order to select all of its path outlines. Because after all, they're all relegated to a single layer. And now, I'll go ahead and hide the Layers panel, and then, I'll go to the Object menu. Imagine I'm doing this for the first time. Choose Path, and then choose Offset Path, then, of course, because I'm doing this for the first time, I would want to check my settings by turning on the Preview checkbox, which is showing me the original path outlines as well as the new ones, by the way, after which point, I'll click OK in order to accept that change, and then I'll press ctrl + shift + a, or cmd + shift + a on the Mac, and just like that, all of the gaps have disappeared. And those are actually a couple of different ways to fill in the gaps after applying the new and improved Simplify command, here inside the most recent version of Adobe Illustrator.

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