Gradients and mesh

The paint slot

The rail collapses related tools into slots. The paint slot holds Gradient, Mesh Gradient, Paint Bucket and Spray, with Gradient in the slot by default. Click the slot's triangle to open the flyout and pick another member. Your pick sticks, so if you spend a week pouring flat colour, Paint Bucket can own that slot instead.

Mesh Gradient has no keyboard shortcut. Reach it through the paint slot's flyout.

Dragging out a gradient

1. Choose the type before you drag The bar starts with New: linear, radial and conic. Those three buttons set the type used for the next gradient you drag out. Linear is the default.
2. Choose fill or stroke Two buttons, Apply to fill and Apply to stroke. Fill is the default. Yes, gradients on a stroke work, and they are edited exactly like a fill gradient.
3. Drag across the object The drag defines the gradient. Where you start and where you release becomes the geometry.
4. Adjust on the canvas Handles appear on the gradient. Drag them to move the start, the end and the individual stops. Double-click the gradient line to insert a stop there.

Working on the canvas is usually faster than working in the bar, because you are looking at the artwork rather than at numbers. The bar is for the things a drag cannot express.

The rest of the gradient bar

• Select lists every linear and radial gradient already sitting in the document. Pick one and it is assigned to the current object's fill or stroke. This is how you reuse a gradient rather than rebuilding it.
• Reverse flips the stop order.
• Repeat sets what happens past the ends: None, Direct or Reflected.
• Stops chooses which stop is active. Offset is that stop's position from 0 to 1.
• Insert new stop and Delete stop do what they say.
• Color is a live swatch for the active stop. A is that stop's opacity from 0 to 1.

The Color swatch is not a browser colour input. Clicking it routes the edit to the Fill and Stroke panel, which is where the full picker lives. If you expected a small native swatch popup, that is why you did not get one.

Mesh gradients

A mesh gradient is a grid of coloured corners with colour interpolated across the patches between them. It is how you shade something organically rather than along a single axis.

Pick Mesh Gradient from the paint slot and click an object to create or edit a mesh on it. The bar offers a normal or conical mesh, a fill or stroke target, Rows and Columns, buttons to insert a row or a column at the largest gap, a colour smoothing control, and controls to straighten or curve the edges around the selected corner, smooth all edges, or fit the mesh back to its object. The Corner swatch and its A field set the selected corner's colour and opacity.

Worth knowing how this is built, because it explains what you can and cannot do with the result. The renderer has no mesh gradient primitive, so Rayzia approximates one faithfully: each patch is a Coons surface tessellated into small flat-colour quads inside a group, clipped to the target shape. At normal zoom it matches a real mesh. The mesh model is stored on the group, so it stays editable, but the artwork in the file is quads rather than a single mesh element.

The other two in the slot

Paint Bucket (U) fills a bounded region. It snapshots the rendered canvas, flood-fills from your click, traces the mask into polygons, and creates a real new path through the builder. Its bar has Fill by (visible colours, or a single channel, or lightness), Threshold, a grow or shrink amount, a Close gaps setting of None, Small, Medium or Large, and a reset. Close gaps defaults to Small, which handles most hand-drawn outlines that do not quite meet.

Spray (A) sprays the selected object along your drag in four modes: independent copies, clones that follow the source, everything merged into one growing path, or delete to erase what you sprayed. Width, Amount, Scale, Scatter and Focus tune the result.

Paint Bucket is a raster flood traced back into vector. If you want the true planar region formed by overlapping paths filled without touching the originals, that is the Live Paint Bucket, which has its own rail slot rather than living here.

Common questions