Here’s feature I would love: The ability to copy to illustrator file format. So you would have some sort of copy special > to .AI format and put that in your clipboard.
I make all my vectors for illustrator using rhino (because rhino is so much better) but it’s a drag to have to select my vectors, save a file, open illustrator, navigate the folder structure and then import the file. It would be great to take all those steps out of my workflow.
Is this something I could perhaps do myself? I can code so is there a scripting language for Rhino for mac?
You could certainly script or perhaps even macro a one-button or alias export of an .ai format file to a specific folder on your drive where you could easily pick it up from in Illustrator. I’m not sure if Illustrator has hooks to automate opening it and the file remotely, though, so you would still need to do that.
Then I set up an action in illustrator to open the file that was created by rhino.
So the workflow is draw in rhino select the geometry and click the button. Open illustrator and click action to bring it in. It’s pretty quick and could be further sped up by assigning some keyboard shortcuts.
That’s a decent workaround. I actually remember there being a script of some sort that did this for you from Rhino 3.
But I’d love to be able to select curves and get a special copy function. I probably would name it a new tool like copy svg or something like that. I would probably have the tool use whatever cplane you’re on, so default perspective would be top. And that would just copy the selected curves to the clipboard as vector curves in the svg format. This would work for inkscape, illustrator, powerpoint, pretty much anything that accepts the format.
You could also allow pasting from clipboard if it’s in the same format. That way you could actually copy and paste from illustrator more easily, as well as other software.
I also prefer doing my line work in Rhino. It is so much faster to get precise shapes. And often times someone hands me something in illustrator that I need to quick edit and send back to them. I’d rather just grab the pieces I need from there, and send just the pieces I need back, and keep that workflow as efficient as possible.