Does anyone know any tricks to make Adobe Illustrator gradient meshes to work more quickly? I know that they take up a lot of space (memory) but that doesn’t explain why they are so slow. So I’m hoping that someone has a trick/workaround…
anyone? anyone? Beuller? Beuller?
I’ve never had much difficulty with mesh gradients. But I’ve only used them in older versions of Illustrator. I can’t speak from experience with any version past CS2. I do know that you can delete many of the redundant points in mesh gradients. That would probably speed things up.
The biggest reason why any Adobe product slows down, other than Ram, is because they are scratch hogs.
The fastest way to work with them is to keep 1/3 to 1/2 of your hard drive empty for scratch space so the software isn’t seeking for blocks to dump history information. That also means running the maintenance scripts once in a while (both Mac and PC.)
Secondary hard drives are an option, but they are only as fast as the connection you are using. The startup drive is the fastest option. No movies, no music, no games, no nuthin on the machine that does your paying work.
(Though, I am concerned with the new SSD hard drives and the write/rewrite life…)
It’s counter-intuitive, but sometimes shutting off GPU performance helps too.
And Ram of course. 16 gigs is about the minimum for current CC products if running them all together. That said though, you would have more trouble in Illustrator with gaussian blurs (glows) than you would with a gradient mesh.
Are you combining effects in some way?
Yeah that reduces the amount of information, but the amount of lag in the processes cannot be explained by that. It’s too massive a difference. Thank you for your input though.
As far as computing power and RAM, that’s not a problem. I’m running fully state of the art Macs, Adobe cloud… All standard and maxed out. (10 Disk Raid for example). I’ve also pulled art from the server to my desktop to work so server communication is also not the problem.
I’m not actually working on any particular piece. This is just something I’ve found occurs on occasion while working in production. I’d like to find a fix to add to my toolbox.
I know that I can just rasterize everything but I hate changing anything vector to pixel as a general rule.
Problem solved.
PRINTDRIVER
When you mentioned the scratch disk I went back through the system and found that one of our settings had changed in the “additional scratch disk” option. Once I changed that to the local drive the problem solved itself.
Thanks a bundle for leading me down the right path! I can’t believe I didn’t check that first lol.
It’s always easy once you know eh?
Glad to help