Compound shape tools in Adobe Fireworks CS5

592

Thierry Lorey

0

5365

12 May, 2010

Description

This article is introducing the new compound shape tools in Fireworks CS5

Requirement

Adobe Fireworks CS5 and higher

Article

1. Definition

Fireworks CS5 has 4 new Compound Shape vector drawing tools in the Properties panel. See Figure 1, towards the right edge of the property inspector panel: Add/Union, Substract/Punch, Intersect and Crop.

The Compound Shape is non-destructive as you can modify the result path by tweaking the individual paths with the sub-select tool. You can move, also scale, rotate and skew the individual paths that constitute the compound shape.



Figure 1: Compound shape tools

Compound shapes (from the Property Inspector) remain editable by subselecting the original vector objects.

2. How it works

You can use the compound shape tools in 2 different ways:

Workflow 1: Add/Union, Substract/Punch, Intersect and Crop existing objects

1. Draw 2 or 3 circles, select them and click on the Add/Union icon or any other compound shape tools and you enter in the compound shape mode: all the circles are selected, indicating a compound shape and they are forming a group of vector objects.
2. To add another circle to the group, draw a circle, select the new circle and the compound shape, select Add/Union and you add a new element to the group. See video.

Workflow 2: Adding, Punching, Intersecting and Cropping successively added objects.

1. Draw a circle. In the Properties inspector panel, with the circle selected, click the Add/Union icon.
2. Draw a second circle. Note that both circles are selected, indicating a compound shape. In the Layers panel you can see that Compound Shape is mentioned.
3. Now draw a third circle. It will be part the compound shape
4. All the future objects that you will draw will be part of the compound shape until you stop it with the Normal button. The Normal button will enable you to stop the compound shape mode. Click on the Normal button and draw a new circle and you will see that the circle is not part of the compound shape. See video.

Add/Union, Substract/Punch, Intersect and Crop using Workflow 1



Figure 2: Compound shape tools

Workflow 1 vs workflow 2



Figure 3: Compound shape tools

The 3 paths (1) crop with existing paths (2) and crop with adding successive objects (3)

Color

You will note that in a compound shape only one color prevails, usually the color of the bottommost object.

Stacking order

When you are using Workflow 1, the result is different for Substract/Punch, Intersect and Crop when you change the sublayers' stacking order

In the following examples the Substract/Punch tool is used



Figure 4: Compound shape tools

In Figure 4 you can see the sublayers stacking order: orange, green, blue and the end result



Figure 5: Compound shape tools

In Figure 5 you can see the sublayers stacking order: green, blue, orangle and the end result

We can conclude that the result is different according to the stacking order when using Workflow 1. The top-most object is the selected object that will be used to punch in our example.