I have been using the envelope distort feature (make with mesh) for a few years without any issues. It normally works exactly as I need it to. However, there now seems to be a problem...

What I normally do is I embed an image (usually a tiff) into the illustrator file. Then Object > Envelope Distort > Make with mesh. Then I input the number of rows and columns I would like to use and distort as necessary. The number of rows and columns is normally not an issue. But now for some reason I am limited in the number nodes I can use — a limit only discovered by trial and error depending on the raster I am manipulating.

I have opened old projects where I have done the same thing and the original mesh is working fine. However, when I try to reproduce the mesh from scratch it doesn't work. Even stranger is that I have imported a working mesh from an old project and applied it to the new raster in the new project and it distorts it even though the number of nodes is higher than the limit I came to by trial and error! But when I go to manipulate the imported mesh it doesn't work again.

I have tried the following:
- Changing the raster file type
- Using older versions of Illustrator
- Creating meshes on different simple objects and attaching to the raster
- Uninstalling and reinstalling Illustrator
- Increasing hard drive space for virtual RAM

My system never had any problems handling this process before - I use an SSD and 16 GB RAM with and intel i7 processor - which should be plenty of processing power for the job.

Any help would be very much appreciated