Doodlebug for Illustrator CC 2018

Hey all -

Maintaining Doodlebug for Grasshopper has been a real pain, because it seems to be highly sensitive to the version of Illustrator the user has installed - requiring me to maintain many separate versions (and unable to build for versions I don’t personally have installed.) An illustrator update a few months ago also broke Doodlebug entirely - I was completely unable to get it to work at all. However, the good news is this seems to have been alleviated in the latest version of Illustrator as of 5/1/2018. (image)

So download here - Doodlebug.zip (47.3 KB)

but please also understand that if it breaks again on a future update it is a pretty massive pain to continue to keep it up to date. I will try to update it as I can but I make no promises of continuous maintenance.

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sweet! this plugin is a game changer! thanks a lot for updating!
(i tried to compile my own version but failed)

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btw. until Rhino SR 6.3 it worked … having problems with 6.4 though. What Rhino version do you use?

update: none issue… works now on sr4, but only if rhino is run in admin mode…

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Hi andrew… i have a question… is it actually possible to get a closed curve in rhino to illustrator … as a joined curve?
This is how it looks when I transfer a closed curve (Rhino) into Illustrator…

no this is not currently supported

… i had it working for a day… but now its down again… i cleaned the registry with ccleaner … could that be the problem? is there something i can do?

  1. Solution exception:Unable to cast COM object of type ‘System.__ComObject’ to interface type ‘Illustrator.Application’. This operation failed because the QueryInterface call on the COM component for the interface with IID ‘{95CD20AA-AD72-11D3-B086-0010A4F5C335}’ failed due to the following error: No such interface supported (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80004002 (E_NOINTERFACE)).

@andheum, Any interest in putting the source on github or gitlab? I’d be happy to contribute and I’m sure others would be as well.

it’s already on bitbucket…https://bitbucket.org/andheum/doodlebuggh

Doh! looks like I didn’t search hard enough.

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Feel your pain. same thing with OpenStudio. I can only maintenance one version at time.

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Hello Andrew,

I’m having the following issues with using doodlebug. I’m using Rhino 6 and Illustrator CC 22.1 (64 bit) and I have placed both files in the C:\Users\user_name\AppData\Roaming\Grasshopper\Libraries directory. Please let me know if you have any fixes thanks!

Object: SetLayer (level 1)
{
Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.
TargetInvocationException
}

Object: SetLayer (level 2)
{
Could not load file or assembly ‘IllustratorInterop, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null’ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.
FileNotFoundException
}

Object: CurvesToPaths (level 1)
{
Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.
TargetInvocationException
}

Object: CurvesToPaths (level 2)
{
Could not load file or assembly ‘IllustratorInterop, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null’ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.
FileNotFoundException
}

did you make sure you unblock all the DLLs? It is complaining that it can’t find IllustratorInterop.dll - if it’s already there in the libraries folder then maybe something is preventing it from loading (like the DLL being blocked)

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This worked! Thank you for the quick response. Now there is another error and it seems other users have asked you about this so I apologize in advance for the redundancy but I cannot find a proper solution.

  1. Solution exception:Unable to cast COM object of type ‘System.__ComObject’ to interface type ‘Illustrator.Application’. This operation failed because the QueryInterface call on the COM component for the interface with IID ‘{95CD20AA-AD72-11D3-B086-0010A4F5C335}’ failed due to the following error: No such interface supported (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80004002 (E_NOINTERFACE)).

This indicates that the version of doodlebug installed does not match the installed version of illustrator. Unfortunately there is very little to be done for this - for some reason the illustrator library needs to be recompiled for every single minor version change. If you are capable with visual studio you can download the source and build the library yourself against the version of illustrator that’s installed. I know this is a massive headache but unfortunately I cannot develop / maintain separate versions of the plug-in for every version of illustrator. You can also look around and try using other versions people have uploaded, like here.

Thank you for having developed the tools to begin with. I’m on CC 2019 so assuming that doodlebug won’t be available until later down the track (hopefully). However, I’m looking forward and just wanted to thank you champ.

hi @andheum

Thanks so much for everything. Any chance for Doodlebug to be rebuilt for Illustrator 2019 ? Am trying with Visual Studio but things seem to have moved a bit since 2018.

Hi Olivier - sorry, I don’t even own a PC with illustrator anymore - I cannot rebuild it myself.

Any chance somebody is working on a 2019 version?

@andheum I think i’m having issues re-pointing the references for RhinoCommon and Grasshopper. What I did was I deleted GH_IO, Grasshopper, and RhinoCommon references and then added them via “browse”. the .dll files were found under Program Files. I then get a red check mark next to the “Doodlebug” project, however, when I build it, I get 245 errors.

Most of the errors are CS0246 “The type or namespace name 'Grasshopper” could not be found - the same for ‘Rhino’ and ‘GH_Component’
Another common error is CS0115 ‘parameter here’" no suitable method found to override.

The IllustratorInterface project seems to be working fine as i’m able to connect to Illustrator 2019.

This is my first time using Visual Studio so i’m pretty clueless. Do you have any idea what I might be doing wrong?