Gradient Thicken

[morrieg]

I want to do something like the thicken tool, but instead of filling the space with a solid color, I want the area to be filled with a gradient from the original color to some final color. There doesn't seem to be a tool to do this directly. Are there any tricks to doing this?

[poolvibe]

Just thicken, then apply any attributes desired? make one then use the eyedropper and needle to replicate.

[morrieg]

The problem is that the object being thickened is a closed bezier, and I don't know how to create a gradient perpendicular to the curve.

[Alfred Scott]

You can rotate the angle with the mouse. Suggest you read the documentation for the tool. Page 236. It is all explained very clearly.

Alfred

[Derek]

I suspect you're asking for something like this but I don't think a gradient fill can do it.

[morrieg]

Exactly Derek, that's what I want to do. Except in my case, the gradient goes from a solid color to white and stops there, instead of going back to a solid color. It's like a fuzzy line, with a sharp edge on one side.

[Derek]

Like this?

[morrieg]

Yes perfect, except in my case I want the hard edge on the outside of the object. My shape is also much more complex, so it can’t be approximated with a radial gradient. What application did you use to do this?

[Derek]

Well the good news is I did it in PowerCADD. The bad news it isn't perfect and it's 'costly'.

The basic steps are:
1. use a parallel offset tool to create a second bezier at the width you want the blur.
2. set the pen colour of the 'hard' bezier to what you want
3. set the colour of the other to white (or anything else)
4. then use the bend tool to produce a lot of new intermediate beziers with the colour fading between the coloured and white beziers.

You'll need to play around with the pen thickness of the two original beziers and the number of the iterative steps the blend uses.

There are areas where the blend tool doesn't work quite right in complex shapes but you can probably tweak things by simplifying the shapes before you start. If you look at the next attachment you can see it hasn't worked well down at the bottom of the shapes. On the left are the two beziers before I made the inner one white.

I said it was costly because this solution produces lots of additional lines but it kind of works to get the result you're after.

[morrieg]

Wow, this does do a very nice job, providing my curve isn't too complex. Success depends on how well the parallel offset tool is able to replicate the curve without introducing strange artifacts. It's not so happy with beziers made with the cloud tool, but polygons and smooth curves seem to work out well. Thank you for the advice!