Bonjour! I am slowly teaching myself how to work with this fabulous programme. I’m finally at the point where I have made a simple, multi-size 3/4 circle skirt pattern (basic, I know), and would like to nest the multiple size .svgs using illustrator so that I can print them all out at once and trace them off as needed (I work in a ballet shop so we use lots and lots of circles!)
Is there a particulary easy way of doing this? I have a hard time lining everything up nicely in illustrator. I feel like I’m missing something, some way of adding a reference point or something like that. I would love to know your tips! Thank you so much!!
It’s not difficult to do, but there is no “easy way”.
You will have to produce a pattern for each size, and export them in .svg format to Illustrator.
I use Inkscape, and it works well. Inkscape has a “Align and Distribute” tool, which allows to organize the different objects as you want (align their center point, middle horizontal or vertical lines, distribute space between objects, etc…).
That would be my suggestion for now. The probem though is that in many cases simply aligning by top, biotton, left, right, or center is not where you would want to align a group of nested pieces, @Grace and I have discussed this, and what we need is a way to designate an origin point for a piece, so that the pieces can be aligned according to the origin point. For ex: Take the following sleeve…it’s aligned by the red cross lines - which is neither by the top, bottom, left, right, not center.
Defining your own point would indeed be very useful.
But as your exemple goes,can’t you keep the construction lines when exporting to .svg ?
In Inkscape, and I guess the same applies for Illustrator, you can move the object’s center point wherever you want. You might have to do this for every objects before nesting them, but still.
Here, you could still nest properly the pieces aligning them on one of the sleeve points on the horizontal red line, then distribute the pieces on a vertical axis.
But, yes, I get that being able to define an origin point directly when drafting would be of great help.
Based on @Blueleto & @Douglas comments, you could draft in a point at the desired reference point & a tiny circle around it. Mark the circle as an internal path, & you have a tiny little circle to set as your reference point! I hope that makes sense outside of my head!
Hi! I’ve been trying to make this work, but I’m running into a problem.
Say I want to nest two sizes. I would export both layouts separately to svg files, and nest them in Inkscape. However, when I export the sizes, the layout differs. This means I can’t nest the pattern in Inkscape, because the pattern pieces are in different locations for different sizes.
Is there a way to save the locations and orientations of pattern pieces?
Or do I have to save the layout, cut out each pattern piece separately and nest them separately in Inkscape?
I normally allow enough space around the pattern pieces to allow for the larger sizes to fit into the same area and then export each size to .svg.
In Inkscape, I import each size into its own layer and then Uncombine the pattern pieces and Combine each pattern piece with all of it’s lines and notches, etc. inside that layer.
This way, all of the pattern pieces are normally in the same place but still need to be aligned nicely, while each size remains in it’s own layer.
Once I’ve aligned all the pieces through the sizes, then I start moving them around to save paper, etc.
Use the export button from the Piece mode toolbox, (or key in E, P from the Piece mode,) that way the pieces get exported exactly as oriented in the Piece mode.
