Knowledge Base AI

To create a textured plaid or stripe like a space dye or jaspé, the first thing you’ll want to do is draw out your plaid using solid blocks of color. If these colors are not part of your AI swatches or from an existing .ase palette, add the color into your Illustrator swatches library.

Next, open up your desired space dye or find a picture of one on google. It’s best if this image is in repeat but that’s not super important.
Place this artwork into the AI weave file.

Then, use the DesignPro raster recolor tool to recolor the space dye swatch in all of the weave bar colors. Do this twice, once with the texture going horizontally and once with it going vertically.

Finally, fill the solid color blocks of your weave with the raster-recolored space dyes, placing the horizontal direction in the weft and the vertical direction in the warp.

Please note that are you can’t run this file in colorist. To recolor, you’ll have to make raster recolors of all the desired swatches again and re-fill, then “swatch” the generated weave once that’s done.

For additional information or support, please email support@AquarioDesign.com

You can edit the repeat size of a weave by scaling the warp and weft bars or manually adjusting the color bars to meet the criteria for the new repeat size.

Scaling the Weave bars:

1. Go to the Weave Generation section at the bottom of the weave tool and find the Scale option.
2. Check off Warp and Weft if you want to scale the entire weave proportionately, or just one of them if you only need to scale one side.
3. Type in the number that you want to scale it by and hit Enter.

Manually Adjusting the Repeat Size:

• Use the Selection tool to select the Weave bars and drag them shorter or longer. Select all the warp and weft bars at once and hold Shift to scale proportionately¬†or adjust the bars one at a time. Use the Align button to re-align any bars that need it. Then hit Generate.
• Use the Element Details section of the Weave tool. Select a Weave bar and make sure Enable Length Change is checked off. Type in the new length of that bar in the highlighted field above and hit Enter. Do this for all Weave Bars, then hit Generate to update the Weave swatch.

You can show the overall repeat size of the weave by using the rulers or dimensions buttons that are available on the Design Bar. Toggle them on and off after editing the repeat size to show the new size. If you do not see the Rulers and Dimensions icons on the Design Bar, click the Aquario Design logo on the left of the Design Bar and make sure Quick Dimension Utilities are checked off.

For additional information or support, please email support@AquarioDesign.com

When creating vector artwork to simulate a striped repeat use the Repeat tool instead of the Weave tool. The Weave tool will force you to use a warp and weft and choose solid color positions for both, this can dilute the look of your stripe. 

Use the Repeat tool in conjunction with Ai Shape tool to create blocks of color and put them into repeat. Use Colorist for colorways and presentation. 

For Further assistance please contact support@AquarioDesign.com

1. Create the Warp and Weft Weave bars using the Add Element tool and Generate the Weave.
2. Add textures to the weave as pattern swatches in Illustrator that get placed in the color bars either by selecting the color bars and changing their color fill to the pattern swatch, or by making colorways using Colorist and using the color chips to recolor the weave to have pattern swatches.

Pattern swatches can be in raster or vector format. For further assistance please email support@AquarioDesign.com

In the CC2019 version of Illustrator, the Ai tool box sometimes defaults to the “Basic” setting, which will hide many of the Illustrator tools including the DesignPro Weave, Knit, and Fashion features.

The tools referred to here For Weave are the Add Element Tool, Select Element, Draw Pattern, and Dobby Magnet tools. The Knit tools here are the Knitting tool, Knit Selection tool, Knit Paint tool, and Knit Eyedropper tool. The Fashion tools are the Fashion Sketch Pen tool and the Symmetry line tool.

There a few ways to show the Aquario Design tools in the Illustrator toolbar:

1. Go to the Toolbar and click the “…” at the bottom
2. Click the Options icon at the top right corner
3. Check off Advanced

• Go to Window>Toolbars>Advanced. This will expand the toolbox to include the DesignPro tools.
• Go to Window>Workspace>Essentials Classic. This will change the Illustrator workspace to the classic  essentials setup from older versions of Illustrator, including expanding the toolbox to include the Aquario Design tools.

For additional information or support, please email support@AquarioDesign.com

When creating a weave simulation to mimic a jacquard weave, there are a few tools necessary to.

After copying and pasting weave bars and placing them in another section of the design, you must click the Align button on the Weave tool under the Property Elements section. If you do not, when you click the Copy Warp to Weft button, the weave bars that have been duplicated will shift to sit behind any bars that they were placed on top of. For additional help, please reach out to contact@aquariodesign.com

Aquario Design version 5.0.1 was packaged without the Aquario Design weave swatches, knit symbols and fashion sketch brushes libraries. To get them back, you can update or backdate to another release of Aquario Design OR contact the support team to manually add the libraries into your presets library. For additional information or support, please contact contact@aquariodesign.com

You can use the Element Details section in the Weave tool to change the length of the weave bars, but the Numeric Design Tab will be disabled after colorways have been added in Colorist. The length of the bars can be edited and the thread count can be changed. You can delete out bars and redraw them with the Add Element tool, however you cannot use the Copy to Warp/Weft button as this will break the colorways. Any new color bars should be added to the colorways by selecting the bars and clicking the Add button on the Colorways tab in Colorist. For further assistance please email contact@aquariodesign.com

Changing units of measurement on the numeric design tab is only used for weave drawing purposes. To show the repeat size in centimeters, you will need to change the illustrator document to centimeters by going to File – Document Setup inside of AI.

For additional information or support, please email support@AquarioDesign.com

For Weave files, make sure that all Weave Elements have been made with the Add Elements tool. Make sure to save the working Weave file as an Illustrator file. Do not merge Elements using the Illustrator Path Finder tool as this will cause them to not be readable by the Weave or Colorist tools. Merge elements using the Merge button in the Weave toolbox. When you select a functioning Weave element bar with the selection tool, the Element Details section of the Weave tool window will engage and tell you the property type, if it is from the warp or weft, and the length of the bar. If this section does not engage then the Weave bar was not handled or made correctly. You can copy and paste all of the Weave bars into a new Illustrator document and generate the weave again, or re-draw the broken Weave bars using the Add Element tool.

For any additional help please contact us at support@aquariodesign.com for more information.

After looking at the file, there were a few things I noticed that could have caused an issue, especially all done together.

Possible mistakes include:
1. The weave may not have been created in a new file.
2. The thread and pattern bars were checked off in addition to color bars, meaning the customer drew out multiple layers of thread and pattern when adding his stripe color bars.
3. The customer changed the weft pattern bar to one of our plain weave swatches from the basics folder, but chose a larger scale plain weave than the one that we have defaulted, and the one that was in his warp.
4. The colors he chose to draw out his warp stripes were not .ai swatches, but instead just eye dropped from the inspiration sample sitting in the file.

For additional information or support, please email support@AquarioDesign.com

You can scale your weave up to 200% using the Weave module in Illustrator. For any percentage above 200% you will have to use the Illustrator Scale tool, not the Weave tool.

For additional information or support, please email support@AquarioDesign.com