Hello Michael,

While I was editing my previous post to add that I got garbage when trying to work with the imported path... you where explaining the possible problems.
However, you related them to unstroked paths and the weird results I got where on a visible path.


- Michel

Hi Michel, the "unstroked path" problem is just the reason why the curves did not come in at all into MoI v2... the other problems that you show are an additional problem separate from that.

Typically when you see stuff like that it is the result of the path having some kind of self-intersection in it (where it crosses back over itself). I'll take a look.

- Michael

Yeah the tips have a problem where the control points backtrack and cause a tiny self-intersecting loop at the end there, these kinds of self-intersection loops cause inconclusive results for operations that need to determine the "inside" region from the "outside" region.

The backtracking control points are very close together, so you need to zoom in quite a ways to see them, then the loop they cause is also even tinier yet than that so a bunch more zooming yet is needed to really see that:







That needs to be repaired by moving that one out of place control point on each tip part, so that those labels that show "2, 1, 3" are in order like "1, 2, 3" instead.

- Michael

Thanks Michael,

I suspected that and had moved the control points to some extent to try to set them apart but without zooming enough to see the loop.

In another test, I exported to dxf, imported in CorelDraw and saved as Illustrator 7 then imported into MoI and it worked.
But that's a looong way.

Could it be caused by the fact that Illustrator keeps information on line width as a "double path"?
When an object is decomposed in Illustrator, there are two paths corresponding to the inside and outside of the line.
A decomposed object can be imported in MoI but one of the paths needs to be deleted and it could be a bit imprecise.

It may be a silly idea but, since MoI needs a "visible" path to be imported, does it reads/combines/averages the "line contour" instead of working with the vector path ? And this would create the junk info ?

EDIT - It is a silly idea because changing the line width would give different average patterns when imported into MoI and it doesn't.


- Michel

Hi Michel, those bad points are pretty hard to see unless you zoom in quite a bit, they are only 0.0002 units apart from one another.

> In another test, I exported to dxf, imported in CorelDraw and
> saved as Illustrator 7 then imported into MoI and it worked.
> But that's a looong way.

My guess would be that this method working was more of an accidental side effect rather than something to really rely on.

Probably at some point during that process one piece only emitted points to a precision of 3 decimal points or something, which probably caused those close together points to be moved into the same location exactly on top of one another. MoI's AI importer looks for points that are stacked up like this and can clean those up if they are stacked right on top of each other.

But that just happened to work since these points were close together, it is easy to have self-intersection loops in other situations where the points are not quite so close together as this. Unfortunately in those cases I doubt that this import sequence you used would help any.


> Could it be caused by the fact that Illustrator keeps information
> on line width as a "double path"?

My guess is that it was just caused by an accidental extra click of the mouse or something to actually place the points like that... Schbeurd would have to say for sure how that particular path was created.

2D illustration programs are not generally as sensitive to self intersection problems as MoI or other 3D programs can be, so it can be easy to just not notice that a drawn outline may have these problems in it until later.

- Michael

Hi Michel, just one other note:

> It may be a silly idea but, since MoI needs a "visible" path to be imported

It's not so much that MoI actually needs the path to be visible, I mean I could import non-visible paths as well and that was how MoI v1 was set up.

But I was noticing that there were a fair amount of extra unwanted paths coming in with that method so that's why I tried to screen the non-visible stuff out.

I think a good compromise method may be to make one pass through the file screening out non-visible stuff, but if nothing was found on that pass then I will make another pass through and take any kind of path found including non-visible ones on that final pass.

That will help imports in situations like this file where the only paths in the file are non-visible ones.

Does that make sense? Or do you think it would be better to import all non-visible paths that can be found under all circumstances?

- Michael

Hello Michael,

Sorry to have taken you in a wrong direction. I got some sleep and did some more tests.

The errors on the original Illustrator paths are clearly visible when a thicker contour is added.
I attached screenshots of one of the faulty enpoints (left Illustrator, 2 points width ; right CoreDraw, zoom 4000%).

> I think a good compromise method may be to make one pass through the file screening out non-visible stuff, but if nothing was found on that pass then I will make another pass through and take any kind of path found including non-visible ones on that final pass.

> That will help imports in situations like this file where the only paths in the file are non-visible ones.

It would be faster for Photoshop users who do not want to transit in Illustrator just to add a contour to their path.

While experimenting, I got 3 observations/questions :

- Invisible paths
I tried to import an invisible path (path without contour) into MoI 1 but never was able to see any.
Is it because I have the beta version installed at the same time as v.1 ?

- Importing plain rectangles
In another test, I have drawn rectangles, rounded rectangles, circles, lines, distorted rectangles (ex. Arc), text
(in Illustrator CS3 and 4 and on 2 different computers).
Everything would import into MoI except the plain, unmodified rectangles.
Can somebody else reproduce this problem ?

Have a good day !

- Michel

Thanks for all the info. Interesting thread.

>>> And for the moment a quick workaround if you don't have Illustrator is to load it into MoI V1 instead and then save it out or copy/paste it from there.

It works fine. I could import several paths using version 1. Cool

>>> Schbeurd would have to say for sure how that particular path was created.

Not much to say there. The path comes from the Photoshop presets. I was just making a test.

>>> I think a good compromise method may be to make one pass through the file screening out non-visible stuff, but if nothing was found on that pass then I will make another pass through and take any kind of path found including non-visible ones on that final pass.
That will help imports in situations like this file where the only paths in the file are non-visible ones.

I think this is the best option.

>>> It would be faster for Photoshop users who do not want to transit in Illustrator just to add a contour to their path.

Well, you can not really add a contour in Photoshop like you do in Illustrator.

Thanks for the help. I'm now able to import the paths via MoI V.1

Schbeurd

Hi Michel,

> - Invisible paths
> I tried to import an invisible path (path without contour) into
> MoI 1 but never was able to see any.

Did you try the .ai file that was attached to the start of this thread?

That one should work in v1.

If you have some other file that does not work in v1, can you please post it, maybe you are running into some other issue or bug with your new file.


> Is it because I have the beta version installed at the same time as v.1 ?

No, they are totally independent, the only way they can really get crossed is if you have set one of them as the program to handle a particular kind of file extension and then you try to open that file by something like a double-click in Windows Explorer.


> - Importing plain rectangles
> Everything would import into MoI except the plain, unmodified rectangles.
> Can somebody else reproduce this problem ?

Can you please attach the .ai file with the plain rectangle in it here?

Those other things were probably generic bezier paths, but there is a special "re" operator that can be used for simple rectangles, maybe MoI has a bug in processing this particular operator.

- Michael

Hi Schbeurd,

> Not much to say there. The path comes from the
> Photoshop presets. I was just making a test.

Oh sure, blame the junky geometry on someone else.... ;)


I've got this tuned up now for the next v2 beta, so that AI files like this which have only non-visible paths in them will get those pulled in like they were for v1.


Thanks for posting the example file, it helps a lot to have that to debug with!

- Michael

Importing plain rectangles from Illustrator

>Can you please attach the .ai file with the plain rectangle in it here?

>Those other things were probably generic bezier paths, but there is a special "re" operator that can be used for simple rectangles, maybe MoI has a bug in processing this particular operator.

Hi Michael,

Here is an Illustrator file with a rectangle and a distorted rectangle with vectorized text labels.
The plain rectangle doesn't import into MoI. The rectangle shape letters ( i and l ) of the vectorized text neither.

- Michel

Hi Schbeurd,

I checked the Photoshop preset path you used and it is impossbe to see the defective control points even at the highest zoom.
(though they are clearly visible in Illustrator as shown in a previous post)

I also checked some of the other Photoshop preset paths and some of them showed junk paths too, even visible in Photoshop (Ex. Ornament 8).

So, you'd better draw your own paths for your next tests I think,

- Michel

>>> Oh sure, blame the junky geometry on someone else.... ;)

Hehe ! ;-) Fortunately, Michel found some other junk paths in the Photoshop presets so I'm definitely not guilty ! :-))

>>> I've got this tuned up now for the next v2 beta, so that AI files like this which have only non-visible paths in them will get those pulled in like they were for v1.

Thanks. I'm impatient to discover the new features of this beta. The fix will be a welcome addition.

>>> So, you'd better draw your own paths for your next tests I think

Sure. Actually, the toolset of MoI is sufficient for almost all my needs. One reason for which I can use Photoshop is explained in the attached image.

Additional notes on plain rectangles importation problem:

- When the ai file is created from Photoshop, the plain rectangles import correctly in MoI.
- When a rectangle is rotated in Illustrator, it also imports correctly in MoI.

- Michel

Hi Michel, this was a bug in MoI's path processing, when handling the special "re" (rectangle) operator when the width or height of the rectangle was specified as a negative value.

It looks like Illustrator just happens to generate rectangles with a negative width value, while Photoshop generates them with a positive width value, which is why the Photoshop ones avoided the bug in MoI.

I have fixed this up for the next v2 beta, so that the rectangles generated by Illustrator will be handled properly now.

I think it should also be possible to avoid the problem in the current beta if you export using the older version AI format, like version 8 or earlier. Those older file formats were before they switched to the PDF style format and the old style files do not have a "re" operator, instead they will just contain 4 lines to make a rectangle so those should work.


Thanks for posting the example file and the additional information!

- Michael

Thanks a lot Michael,

Looking forward for the next beta.

- Michel