UI Screenshots

View the screenshots below to see what the settings for this function look like within the Randomill panel.

Create sub-selections from a set of currently selected objects.

This function allows you to select the top, middle, or bottom-most objects of the current selection, in terms of their position in the layer stack. You can specify a specific percentage or explicit number of objects to select.

When would this function be useful?

This is a utility function that doesn’t create interesting patterns by itself, but can prove itself useful by saving you time in creating precise selections quickly in Illustrator.

Let’s say you have a landscape illustration where there are a lot of individual raindrops or snowflakes scattered throughout the artboard. One thing you might want to do is to make the top 10% of the snowflakes a little brighter since they would be higher up in the sky, catching more light.

This function would allow you to do that by just selecting all of the snowflakes and executing the function with 10% dialed in.

What is “Experimental Fast Select”?

This option is an alternate way for Randomill to create selections of objects. The way it works is by creating a temporary action (the same type of action that you would record in the actions panel) and then execute that newly created action to select the objects.

The way the dynamically created action works is that for every object that has to be selected, Randomill will set the ‘note’ of that object (an obscure feature accessible through Illustrator’s attribute panel) to be contain some text. The action that Randomill creates works by selecting all objects that have that text within the note of the object.

This works much faster (by orders of magnitude) than the standard selection method, but may be less reliable, and is therefore an optional experimental feature. However, everyone should use it if it works for them since it’s so much faster.

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