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Node help in Ai

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Im hoping someone can help me out here.What im trying to learn and i cant seem to find it unless i dont know what to look under .. 

 

What im trying to do is i have an image of a t-rex head and a separate image of T-rex arms that i want to join together to make them one cut instead of having the 2 images cut separately.Ive tried placing them so they are touching each other and trying to get them to join under path but it tells me it cant cause im doing it wrong.. So hopefully some can give instruction as to what im doing.. Here is the file if uploads correctly..If you Ungroup the arms from the head you will be able to move each image individually .I couldnt get the file uploaded that i wanted, So this one will work and  i know the 2 ends are not the same size if you tried to join them,So im just wanting to know how to make them as 1 image to prevent the 2 images from having a cut between  the arms to the neck If you understand what i need...I hope i explained it enough for everyone..Thank you for your time and help..

SVG female t-rex head and arms test faing left.svg

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It just worked for me in AI.

I grabbed the arms and moved them up to the neck to where the lines of neck & arms crossed.

Use black arrow and select the whole image.

On the transform pallet, go pathfinder-merge

Done

 

Interestingly, it would not do it for me using the menu options at the top.

Cal

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Thanks clhyer, I will give it a shot.I didnt know how to do it ,So hopefully its easy for me lol//Where did you find the transform pallet etc. I am using Ai cs6. Guess my eyes wont navigate to what i need to see haha

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Ok ,so i tried exactly what you said, i found the transform section after i selected the whole image like you described ,when i went to join this is what popped up on my screen.....----->  "The selected objects cannot be joined as they are invalid objects(Compound paths,Closed paths,text objects,Graphs,Live paint group). You can use Join command to connect two or more paths, Paths in groups, or to close an open path... "

 

So i think i missed something?

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Sorry that I cannot be of more help.  When I tried with the menu dropdowns it wouldn't work for me either.

If you want to send the file to me I will do the merge and send it back - that's the best I can do.

Surely there are some AI experts that can solve this riddle though.

Cal

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I'll try to find some time to play with this this morning. What version of AI are you using? Also try to refrain from using "Merge" in the pathfinder tools as it will generally create unfilled paths in all the open holes that you will either have to remove or will create a double cut. Some work around this in the cut by color options of your cutting program but it's awfully easy to miss that and get a mess so I recommend doing it right from the get-go.  

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Don't know if you knew all this was going on in your file....

 

post-43059-0-22959500-1421075266_thumb.p

 

...and Illustrator is not my first choice for correcting the problems.

(so, I'm not any help with instructions there)

Here's a repaired, 2 color positive from it. Hope it helps.

 

post-43059-0-24120000-1421075273_thumb.p

 

T-rex_02b.svg

T-rex_02b.eps

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OK I opened the file and I guess I'm not clear on what you are wanting to do. There are two arms and the head but no body. Are you wanting to connect them like Skare did or is there a missing piece? The missing piece would make the most sense especially as to the error message you are getting. There are extra objects in all the white (open) areas. This is from using merge probably as discussed earlier. To remove them just find one in the layers panel and select it from there with the button on the right side of the item in the layers list. You should see it on the screen get selected then select>same>fill color and all of them will be selected and you can delete them and you will see that your object still looks like it should and you no longer have the extra objects hiding in there. 

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Thank you clhyer,Wildgoose,Skarecrow,Im using Ai cs6.And skarecrow you nailed it  and i didnt know that was going on,not sure what i did lol but all my other art work has had no issues if they had that in there as well when its cut.All cuts have been perfect..Now if i can figure how you did it and do it in Ai  lol  .And Wildgoose its supposed to be like that with no body, i tried the image on the the tyrex 800 atv with and without the body and i felt it looked better without. Thank you guys so much.i just have to figure out how to do what you did. I have ai cs6,Vector magic and inkscape.I cant get myself to understand inkscape for some reason,so ive just stuck with Ai and vector magic..  You all Rock.. Skarecrow what do you use?

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Ha ha! I use AI primarily and I too struggle with Inkscape so don't feel bad about that at all. Inkscape goes about things from a different angle than AI and if you were to try out Corel you would likewise find that they way they approach a design is just different. Probably end up at the same place in most cases but different process to get there. I use CS5 which other than an improves look in CS5 they are basically the same. Just wanted to know because some of the older versions have different quirks like the old CS2 that I keep on my other computer which you have to alt click in the pathfinder tools to get the same result that CS5 & CS6 get from just a regular click. 

 

Just for reference though the file you originally posted has white or uncolored objects in all the open spots. I don't know what cutting program you use but if you are NOT having any problems with an extra pass being made then it must be sorting it out for you which is good. 

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I don't have AI, but I suspect your problem is the white fills. If you put the image on a colored background you can see the fills and get a better understanding of what is going on. I use Inkscape, and if I try to merge all the objects it all goes white because it's using the white fill to color everything.

 

If you're other images also have white fill like this, but have not had any issues when cutting, you might want to closely watch the cutter and see if it is in fact double cutting areas of the image, or as wildgoose suggest, your cutting software could be sorting it out for you.

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I don't have AI, but I suspect your problem is the white fills. If you put the image on a colored background you can see the fills and get. I use Inkscape, and if I try to merge all the objects it all goes white because it's using the white fill to color everything.

 

If you're other images also have white fill like this, but have not had any issues when cutting, you might want to closely watch the cutter and see if it is in fact double cutting areas of the image, or as wildgoose suggest, your cutting software could be sorting it out for you.

Very good observation DS. AI will definitely recolor the whole thing during a lot of operations. Primal you can check this by looking at the image in outline mode and see if it's actually still there or not. Also agree with DS on the double cut. Watch close and see if it's making a double pass. You might be surprised. 

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