Sweep #
The Sweep operation drags stroke polygons along a given vector or path to create several effects, such as the pseudo-3D extrusion and shadowing.
The mathematical terminology behind this concept is Minkowski sum.
From Sidebar Panel #
The Sweep
button in the sidebar panel performs the operation on each selected stroke by typing the lengths of a 2D vector.
Shape Style #
The following 3 styles apply:
- Extrude: It turns the shapes into a pseudo-3D look.
- Outer Shadow: It is similar to the Extrude style but the output only contains the newly generated paths.
- Inner Shadow: It generates a rim inside the input stroke shape.
If you need to turn strokes into real 3D objects instead of pseudo-3D ones, you may consider Mesh Generation operators instead.
Curved Path #
Path Type
option, the last selected stroke can be used as the path. The path itself will not be processed. Therefore, please select at least two strokes in this mode.
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Process Holdout #
Since material holdout is used to represent holes in a shape, it would look incorrect when sweeping it together with other shapes. Therefore, the following special rules can be applied:
- For Extrude and Outer Shadow style, execute Inner Shadow for holes instead. If the holdout material is generated by this add-on's Hole Holdout operation, the material will be changed back to the non-holdout one.
- For Inner Shadow style, the holes are excluded from the input and ignored.
Color Tint #
A new vertex color can be assigned to the output strokes. With a tint color and the Keep Original
option on, repeating the operator for multiple times can create a gradient coloring effect.
From Toolbar #
Sweep operations can also be performed from the toolbar as a tool named 2D Sweep
. Instead of typing numbers, the path vector is controlled by mouse dragging.
The style can be switched by holding different keys:
- Default: Extrude
- Ctrl: Outer Shadow
- Shift: Inner Shadow
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