Featured Artist - Egypt Urnash explores AG Transform

AG Transform is just one of the latest AG Utilities Live Effect Building Blocks to be added to the Astute Graphics plugin suite. We asked our beta testers to try it out, and boy did they deliver! Our very special Margaret Trauth (aka Egypt Urnash) took AG Transform and ran with it. Pushing the Adobe Illustrator effect in directions we didn't even consider possible. You can take a look at Margaret's original Illustrator file here to explore it yourself.

AG Transform in Maraget's own words...

This is an exploration of a technique I've been using for a couple of years now, where I make Illustrator do some automatic shading by using the native Transform effect on a secondary fill to do an off-center scale with an extra copy, followed by a native Pathfinder operation to either do Minus Front or Intersect depending on if I want a rim-light or a fill light. Maybe use a gradient, maybe play with different blend modes. Maybe apply some other effects like roughen/blur/stipple/etc. There's a ton of possibilities even before you mix in plugins.

You can stack up multiple fills on a single path this way. Top light + a shadow + accentuating the bottom rim of that shadow + a side light? Can do. Each one's its own fill though, and it starts to get kinda complicated to edit. And pretty tedious. Astute's Live Effect Parameter editor helps this some but only a little. And you're pretty much limited to the eight cardinal directions, you can fuss with out-of-proportion transformations and maybe a little rotation of the transformed shape to get some variance but it's hard to control. 

It's a lot of fun to just whip out new shapes with the Pencil tool and have them instantly shaded, though! (You will of course need to have turned on 'fill new pencil strokes' in the tool's options and turned off 'new art has basic appearance' in the Appearance panel's menu. The defaults get in the way of this.)

When I looked over the docs for Astute's new AG Transform effect, I immediately found myself wondering if I could use the 'tagged path' mode to make this a lot simpler. After digging through a sample file to figure out exactly how to use that mode, I was able to do this.

It's a little awkward - the highlight and shadow paths have to be on the appearance of a group rather than the basic path, and every group needs to have its own tagged path. But it's still a pretty neat trick to be able to do.

I have a script that stuffs each selected path into its own group and applies a 'lighting' style to the group, and I may try extending this to add a single-point path with the appropriate name. It'd still be a few more steps than I really prefer for lighting stacks, I like to just click on one complex swatch in the Styles palette and start drawing shapes. We will see. It'd certainly be nice to be able to interactively move around my automatic light sources before deciding what sort of setup really works for the composition and going in to add a bunch of broad strokes by hand.