Flooding areas

About vector flood filling

Flood filling lets you 'color in' areas of your design that can't otherwise be filled with the Gradient Tool. This includes areas created from overlapping closed/geometric shapes as well as open curves.

The Vector Flood Fill Tool detects edges in your drawing and then, if a fully enclosed area is detected, it will flood fill to the area's boundary. The current solid color (standard or global) or color gradient specified in the Fill color selector (Color panel) is used for the fill, thus creating a new shape. Assets (vector and bitmap) or stock images can also be used to flood fill.

Some examples include:

• Flooding areas formed by crossing pencil lines
• Creating complex filled vector meshes
• Quick recoloring of individual shapes
• Recoloring areas in architectural line drawings non-destructively

Flooding is carried out by tapping on areas or dragging across multiple areas. The latter being a quick technique that avoids flooding specific objects one-by-one. You can flood fill any object even if it is not selected (filling the whole object) but you can select objects in advance if you want flooding to take into account intersecting shapes and curves.

Fill types

The tool can flood with different types of fills, i.e.

• solid or gradient fills—from the Color panel.
• vector designs—from vector assets stored in the Assets panel. Note that these are converted to bitmap fills.
• bitmaps—from raster assets (Assets panel) or stock images.

Scaling with gradient and bitmap fills

You can select the layer object of any gradient or bitmap fill for editing with the Gradient Tool—this could include swapping the gradient type, adjusting how the gradient/bitmap fill scales or how the bitmap pattern extends.

Flood filling with multiple transparent fills

If any of the above fills have reduced opacity or have alpha, they can optionally be 'layered up' to create multi-fill effects when applied in multiples. For example, transparency gradients and/or textures possessing transparency can be placed over a base solid color. A Fill mode on the tool's context toolbar lets you stack or replace fills.

Picking up flood fills from previously selected areas

Instead of defining the flood fill color via a panel, you can pick up the fill from previously selected areas with the modifier pressed and then flood to other areas. Similarly, bitmap fills can be picked up instead of filling from a image file or panel.

Filling to visible boundaries

When dragging across areas to flood fill, you can enable Fill to Visible Boundaries to fill to overlapping shapes' outlines and either detect (and fill to) internal edges or ignore internal edges. For the latter, if shapes have the same fill color, then the flood fill will extend the fill to encompass those shapes automatically.