Example: Creating design articles in Illustrator

The following exercise walks you through a basic scenario of how you can use the Illustrator/Prinect integration to create design articles in Illustrator. The exercise uses prepared example files that you load as you go through the steps. These files reside in the EngViewWork7\Samples\Images folder of your Prinect installation.

We follow the exercise in two parts:

  1. Creating the articles and applying artworks to them.
  2. Exploring what the Prinect workspace shows us with regard to our work.

For the purposes of the exercise, we will use the design EVF12062 Spherical Box Top Regular Tuck Lock.evd from the Library of Parametric Designs.

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Creating artworks and articles What you seen on the screen

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Creating articles and artworks

Creating an artwork for the front side

  1. In Illustrator, we load the Prinect workspace.
  2. We load the structure that we'll be working on: EVF12062 Spherical Box Top Regular Tuck Lock.evd.

COMMENT: After the structure is loaded, Illustrator opens a default artboard (seen in the Artboards panel) and one article (seen in the Prinect Аrticles panel), with a default front side artwork: Artwork1, held in the artboard EVF12062.front.Artwork1. The structure's 3D representation can is displayed in the Prinect 3D panel.

  1. We proceed by creating a graphical design for the front side artwork of the structure: use the file Candies Pink Design.ai. Find the file in your installation at: C:\EngViewWork7\Samples\Images.
  1. Rename the artwork to Pink Candies. Notice that the name of the artwork-holding artboard changes accordingly.

Creating a second artwork for the front side

  1. In the Prinect Аrticles panel, click in the Front column, and then click New. This is the first step toward creating a new artwork.

The New Artwork dialog box appears.

  1. For the artwork, we type a name that makes sense. In this case, Yellow Candies.

COMMENT: There are two ways of creating an artwork: (1) To copy the artwork of the currently applied artwork and then edit it. In this case, we leave the Copy Artwork check box selected (in the brackets, we see the name of the artwork whose graphics the program will copy to the new artwork). (2) To create a new graphical design, we leave the check box empty.

In the current case, we will not copy the artwork.

  1. Leave the Copy Artwork check box empty, and then click OK. This creates the artwork.

COMMENT: A new artboard — EVF12062.front.Yellow Candies — appears in the Artboards panel. Note also that in the Prinect Аrticles panel, the newly created artwork is applied to the selected article. This is also reflected in the 3D representation.

  1. In the new artboard, place the image Candies Yellow Design.ai. Find the file in your installation at: C:\EngViewWork7\Samples\Images.

Creating an artwork for the rear side

  1. In the Prinect Articles panel, click the Rear column, and then click New.
  1. In the New Аrtwork dialog box, we rename the artwork with a name that makes sense: Pink.

NOTE: So far we do not have a rear side graphical design. That is why the program does not offer to copy any artwork.

A new artboard — EVF12062.rear.Pink — appears in the Artboards panel. Now, to create a graphical project for it, we will use the file Candies Pink Background.ai. Find the file in your installation at: C:\EngViewWork7\Samples\Images.

  1. Repeat Steps 9 and 10 to create a second artwork for the rear side. Name it Yellow.
  2. Insert the image from the file Candies Yellow Background.ai into the artboard EVF12062.rear.Yellow. NOTE: (Find the file Candies Yellow Background.ai in your installation at: C:\EngViewWork7\Samples\Images.)

So far we have four artworks: two for the front side of the structure and two for the rear side. We proceed by combining them into two articles.

  1. In the Prinect Articles panel, click the Front cell of the existing article, and then select Pink Candies.
  2. In the Prinect Articles panel, click the Rear cell of the existing article, and then select Pink.
  3. Rename the article to Pink Design.

Creating a new article for the structure

  1. In the Prinect Articles panel, click Add new article .

A row appears below the first one. Notice that the two articles use the same artworks for their front and rear sides.

  1. For the new article (Article 2), we proceed by assigning artworks for its front and the rear sides — Yellow Candies and Yellow.
  2. Rename the article to Yellow Design.

To see the Pink and Yellow designs in the 3D panel, we switch them by means of the Select Article button , in the lower right corner of the panel.

  1. This completes the exercise.

Selections

When we select something in Illustrator, the integration highlights the respective attributes so that we can orient ourselves in what happens where.

Selecting an artboard

When you select an artboard:

Loading an article in the 3D panel

Selecting a panel in Prinect 3D