can't color same shape with two colors

[Greenlaw]

No,I didn't create a shape on top of another and you can see that in my last post

It's hard to tell because you cropped off the top of the UI, but make sure you don't have Autostroke enabled for the Shape tool. When Autostroke is on, it's still creating a shape, even if it doesn't have fill enabled, and Paint Bucket will still do this with a Stroke-only shape.

My understanding is that Paint Bucket will look for a boundary to fill, and then autotrace it like a bitmap, and the boundary it looks for isn't necessarily a closed vector shape. This is because Paint Bucket is meant to work with complex drawings where the 'shapes' are not clearly defined by points and edges, like the irregular and overlapping shapes created when you draw with the Freehand tool for FBF. I believe Paint Bucket only uses the vector data to create a new shape when no shape exists. Otherwise, it autotraces the visible boundary it finds.

This is why Paint Bucket is generally not recommended when you want a clean shape from the vectors.

Hope this helps.

[Greenlaw]

This has been a good discussion. I was kind of aware of the rules for Paint Bucket, but never thought about it deeply enough to fully understand them. I just avoided PB unless I was using Freehand and FBF.

[Greenlaw]

There's something I want to double-check in what I wrote above. Will probably have more to add tonight.

[MrMiracle77]

As an avid paint bucket tool user, this is very unusual. Paint bucket should only do that for complex or overlapping shapes on the same layer.

For the sake of troubleshooting:

1. Try the square with the 'create object' tool instead.

2. Try the 'delete object' tool on the irregularly created shape and see if the irregular outline remains.

3. Create a square primitive and move some of the points around, also play with the bezier curve tool on the corners. If Moho is (somehow) drawing two near-identical overlapping squares, paint bucket will produce an irregular shape from their overlap. This can also happen if the square has a second line defining one of its sides; it won't be visible to the user, but paint bucket will form an irregular shape.

[Greenlaw]

Question: Is there a reason you need to create stacked shapes using the Paint Bucket?

Just asking out of curiosity. Normally, I only need perfectly stacked shapes when I intend to animate the shape order for an effect, and that's been a rarity for me.

[Greenlaw]

There's something I want to double-check in what I wrote above. Will probably have more to add tonight.

Ok, got the answer I was looking for. Earlier, I wrote:

I believe Paint Bucket only uses the vector data to create a new shape when no shape exists. Otherwise, it auto traces the visible boundary it finds.

This is inaccurate. When Paint Bucket is used on overlapping vectors, and the region has no shapes or welded points, Paint Bucket will create a shape to fit that region. So I think Paint Bucket is always looking for visible boundaries to create its shapes with.

I guess you can try dialing up Point Reduction for the tool, but IMO, it's easier and more reliable to use Create Shape. Create Shape only looks at the selected curve's construction, making it less likely to produce an error or unexpected result.

Update: I just tried increasing Point Reduction, and, nope, that didn't work well for this case. It just made the new 'square' shape more blobby. That does seem odd. But, as mentioned earlier, this is not a situation where I would use Paint Bucket.