Grasshopper to Illustrator - coloured surfaces to vector shapes help

Hi everyone,

Hoping someone can offer some assistance regarding a desired workflow.

I have developed an algorithm in Grasshopper that generates a defined number of unique tile types that are distributed randomly onto a grid. I attach a picture of one of these tile type layers isolated, for ease of clarity.

You can see that I also apply a gradient to these shapes. I want to now export these coloured triangles into Illustrator - so that I have vector shapes to work with.

I bake each layer using the custom preview tool, which retains the colour gradient. So I end up with a bunch of coloured surfaces. When I export this as .ai, it adds these pesky cross lines inside of the triangle area, and also there is no surface/shape to work with in Illustrator.

Capture-1

I tried the Make2d command, which was mentioned in some old forum entries, but this only removes the cross lines and I lose the colour gradient. It just exports the triangle outline. How do I go about converting a Rhino surface into a shape that I can manipulate in Illustrator, while retaining the colour gradient?

Alternatively, I suppose I’ll have to export the lines, manually turn these lines into shapes, and then apply a colour gradient within Illustrator. But hoping I can just export it directly from Rhino into Illustrator as coloured vector shapes. Any advice or tips appreciated, as I want to be able to process large volumes of these for printing. How would you go about this type of workflow?

Trying to get vectors out of Rhino is a total pain. You can export as svg or print as a PDF with vector output. They both actually do pretty much the same thing when you import it into illustrator.

To get rid of the lines (they are called isocurves), you have to select all the surfaces and then turn off “Show surface isocurve” in Properties:

For the colors I would set the print or display color, but that means it will output the shapes with the color in the outline.

Unfortunately for some reason in Illustrator you can only swap Stroke and Fill for things with the same color and not for all selected at once.

Probably easiest to just apply the gradient in Illustrator. You could combine all the shapes and then just have 1 gradient go through all the shapes.

If anything else comes to mind I will let you know.

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There is a plugin for Illustrator that can swap stroke and fill for many objects. Looks like a pretty nuts plugin anyways.