Adobe Illustrator CS2 Tip – Adding Equidistant Vector Points to a Circle.
June 30, 2006 – 7:42 pm | by J. Rodriguez
Layers magazine Tip of the Day
Adobe Illustrator CS2 Tip – Adding Equidistant Vector Points to a Circle.
This is a tip you have to try to really appreciate. Draw a perfect Circle by pressing the Shift key while clicking and dragging with the Oval tool. Your circle is made up of four Segments (four Anchor Points) by default. As part of creating a geometric design you need to add Anchor Points that are equidistant from each other around the circle? To keep it simple, lets say you need a total of 12 evenly spaced Anchor Points.
Select your Circle and go to the Filter menu > Distort > Zig Zag. In the dialog window that opens, set the size to ZERO, Ridges per Segment to TWO, and for Points, select Smooth. It works, but why? In setting the Size of the Zig Zag to ZERO, the Path will not Zig nor Zag. For each Ridge that we add, an Anchor Point is added to each Segment equally spaced from all existing Anchor Points. So if we add TWO Ridges per Segment, that’s EIGHT new Anchor added to our existing FOUR Anchor Points for a total of 12. By selecting “Curved” for Points, it remains a circle. Selecting Corner Points would result in a Polygon instead. You can also use the Roughen Filter to produce similar results.
Tip provided by Jeff Witchel, Certified Adobe® Training Provider
