Effect > Distort & transform > Stacking order
Sometimes you have a group of objects that are not in the correct stacking order, and you have to expand the effects that generate these objects to fix it.
I propose a new effect that offers a few options to change this:
- reverse stacking order
- stack left-to-right, right-to-left, up-to-down, down-to-up, or maybe just an angle dial for stacking order? that'd be super useful for "I drew three balls and blended them to make a necklace and I don't want to have to split it into two blends to make the right ball be the nearest one".
- smallest-to-largest, largest-to-smallest
Margaret Trauth
shared this idea
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Margaret, please do request, I’ll support definitely.
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Margaret Trauth
commented
Oh yeah I know and love Toolshed's stacking order commands, I was delighted to be able to get rid of my old action that would create a blend, do object>blend>reverse front to back, then release the blend, in favor of just hitting object>arrange>stacking order>reverse stack order. Super helpful.
Having it as a live effect makes it a lot more useful though. Generate a bunch of shapes with a blend or a scatter brush or a transform effect or a plugin, add in the Stacking Order effect, and it stays live when you tweak the underlying shapes.
Oh and maybe some controllable randomness in the restacking would be nice too? Astute has this in the controls for their Symbol Stipple effect, but not in their Stipple effect, and not in their Halftone effect either, and the fact that I feel like I would love to see it in all three also makes me feel like it would be great to have in a separate effect. Maybe I should just go to the Astute Slack and ask for this, it really doesn't feel like anyone at Adobe gives a **** about any new features that aren't "generate some messy AI slop" lately.
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Meanwhile Rick Johnson has Toolshed plugin: https://rj-graffix.com/downloads/plugins/#toolshed
One of its free features is Stacking Order, a set of commands to do most of the things you want.
Not an effect, I know, but a way to do it anyway.Another solution would be the Organize script by John Wundes:
https://js4ai.blogspot.com/2012/02/organize.html
https://github.com/johnwun/js4ai/blob/master/organize.jsx -
A related request:
'Reverse Order' option for Transform Effect
http://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657/suggestions/39425077
