Smooth Blend Tool Broken
On the Mac OS, when blending between two shapes using the smooth blend tool, 7/10 times the blend will not be smooth but have one step between the shapes. I can instead create lots of steps as a work-around, but the designated tool does not work. If the shapes are separated far enough, more (but few) steps will appear.
In the images below, you will see an attempted blend between a dark green gradient square, and a light green square. I am using the smooth blend tool.
Christian Bollacke
shared this idea
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Yeah, users don’t really understand how does the Blend tool work, especially the Smooth Color option :(
Here is a long discussion about it: https://community.adobe.com/t5/illustrator-discussions/blend-tool-not-making-smooth-color-blend/td-p/5593744
The solution is found at the second page by Doug Roberts:
> So the cause of this is the Inside stroke attribute in the default graphic style of the 'Web' document preset.Indeed, even when objects don’t have strokes applied, and the weight of it is zero, the Inside attribute is still active, although completely invisible in the Appearance panel and barely visible in the full Stroke panel.
The chance for users to discover it in a way other than chance are slim... and the help article (helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/blending-objects.html) never really explains it. Illustrator just fails to calculate steps, because inside/outside strokes are not 'basic' appearance attributes, they are secret compound paths — again, hardly a public knowledge.
That’s why 'Expand your shapes' workaround works — it remove the Inside stroke attribute, allowing Ai to calculate steps for a smooth transition.
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Christian Bollacke
commented
On the Mac OS, when blending between two shapes using the smooth blend tool, 7/10 times the blend will not be smooth but have one step between the shapes. I can instead create lots of steps as a work-around, but the designated tool does not work. If the shapes are separated far enough, more (but few) steps will appear.
In the images below, you will see an attempted blend between a dark green gradient square, and a light green square. I am using the smooth blend tool.
