Building shapes with the Shape builder in Vectornation by Zaweba
Merge or delete regions of overlapping shapes by dragging across them with the Shape builder in Vectornation by Zaweba, including its gap detection.
Plenty of good logos and icons begin life as a pile of simple circles and rectangles laid over each other. The Shape builder in Vectornation by Zaweba is the tool that turns that pile into finished outlines. You drag across the regions where the shapes overlap, and those regions are merged into one, or deleted, depending on how you use it.
It sits in the group of tools for building shapes, next to the Shape merger, live paint and the Pathfinder panel. Each of them works on overlapping artwork, but the Shape builder is the most direct of the lot, because you decide region by region with the pointer rather than picking an operation from a list.
What the Shape builder is for
Think of the overlapping shapes as a stained glass window. Every place where two outlines cross creates a separate little region. The Shape builder sees those regions and lets you join any set of neighbouring ones into a single shape by dragging a line through them. Drag through the regions you don't want and they can be removed instead.
That makes it a natural fit for jobs such as a cloud built from overlapping circles, a speech bubble made from a rounded rectangle and a triangle, a crescent cut from two circles, or a letterform built from a few blocks. You draw the rough geometry quickly with the basic shape tools, then carve and join it with the Shape builder until it reads as one clean outline.
A simple way to work
Start by drawing the parts. Don't worry about tidy joins, because the overlaps are exactly what the tool needs. Select all the parts that make up the shape you are building, then switch to the Shape builder. As you move over the selection, the regions it can work with become clear.
Drag across the regions that belong together. One stroke through three overlapping circles gives you a single cloud outline with no lines left inside it. Work in small steps if the shape is complicated. A few short drags are easier to undo than one long, wandering one, and Undo names each step, so you can see what you are going back to.
When a region should go, such as the bite taken out of an apple or the inside of a ring, remove it rather than merging it. You end up with a shape that has the hole you want and nothing hiding underneath it.
Gap detection
Since version 0.9.0 the Shape builder has gap detection. Hand-drawn or traced paths often fail to meet exactly, leaving a tiny opening between two lines that should form a closed region. Without help, the tool would see that region as open and refuse to treat it as a face. Gap detection lets the Shape builder close those small openings as it works, so regions that look closed to your eye behave as closed regions in the tool.
It is particularly useful on artwork you did not draw yourself, such as a sketch you traced, a drawing someone sent you, or line work made with the pencil. You can still tidy the paths by hand if you prefer, but gap detection saves a lot of zooming in to hunt for the one break that spoils a fill.
How it fits with the other building tools
Vectornation gives you several routes to the same kind of result, and it helps to know when each one suits. The Shape builder is best when you want to choose regions by eye and keep only some of them. The Shape merger, on Shift+M, works in a similar way and takes its colour from the source or from the current fill. Live paint keeps the shapes editable and fills faces and edges without changing the paths underneath. The Pathfinder panel applies one exact operation to the whole selection, and can keep the result live.
A common pattern is to rough out a shape with the Shape builder, then use the Pathfinder or live effects later when you need a precise, repeatable operation on many objects.
Mistakes to avoid
The first is forgetting to select every part before you start. The Shape builder only works with the shapes in the selection, so a circle left out will simply be ignored. The second is merging regions that you later want to recolour separately. Once regions are joined they are one shape, so if you need different colours in different areas, live paint is the better choice. The third is building on top of artwork that is already grouped in a complicated way. Open the group in isolation first, or work on a copy, so the structure of the rest of the drawing stays as it was.
Used with a little planning, the Shape builder turns a few rough primitives into a finished outline in a minute or two, which is why it tends to become one of the most used tools in the box.
