Skew Polyline

[Rick Martin]

Is there a way to skew a polyline in the same way that you can skew an image in Photoshop? I have a complex, repeating pattern that is based on a rectangular grid, and now I want to change it so that it is based on a parallelogram.

Thanks!

[islandmon]

Try using the Shear Tool or you can get the VectorBit >VBStretch Plugin

[Rick Martin]

Oh for Pete's sake - there it is, right under the Duplicate Along Path tool.

Thanks!

[Rick Martin]

Islandmon, maybe you can help me again - the shear tool will only distort items as parallelograms - which is what I wanted. But now I'm trying to distort a group of polylines into an irregular trapezium, which the shear tool won't do.

Thanks again,

[islandmon]

VB Stretch will get it done ; )

http://www.vectorbits.com/_VB12_site/index.html

[Rick Martin]

Sadly, it doesn't work in 12.5.

Thanks anyway!

[mike m oz]

VB Stretch does work in VW 12.5

You can also move selected points with the marquee mode of the 2D Reshape tool and the Move command. For information on how to do this look under Performing Multiple Reshapes in the Online Help.

Be mindful that he Move command has two modes - cartesian and polar. Choosing the appropriate mode and performing one or two operations should achieve what you want.

[Rick Martin]

Huh,

The version 11.5 won't show up in my workspace editor, so I figured that it was incompatible.

The 2D Reshape and Move commands move all selected vertices the same distance. What I'm trying to do is move them proportionally. Say for example I had a simple grid of squares in a group, and then I wanted to stretch that group to fit into a trapezoid - with every line proportionally moving so that every square is now a trapeziod evenly spaced inside the shape that I stretched it to.

But in my case, the 'grid of squares' is a complex repeating pattern of arcs, lines, circles and ellipses. So it's not really feasible to individually reshape each vertex, especially because each 'square' inside the pattern will actually be a different shape depending on how close to the stretched edge it is.

[Rick Martin]

Solution: exported to Illustrator and used the "Make with Top Object" command. This is the only way I could find that would proportionally stretch complex polyline objects into a trapezoid. And it works in fact for any drawn shape - you could stretch a square peg into a round hole.