illustrator detail =slow rendering?

What is the best way to prepare characters in Ill. so that they import and work with TBS.
Is there a detail threshold, some ‘safe’ level that they will not bog down?

Is there a tutorial for drawing TBS safe characters in Ill.?

I have a heavy Illustrator background (don’t even own ToonBoom yet) and can suggest a workaround.

In early versions of Illustrator, when you created a complex outline and saved to EPS for importing into a page layout program, Illustrator sliced the complex shape into pieces that would be more digestible elsewhere, like RIPS in platemakers. Now, since most computers can handle all but the most complex outlines, it isn’t automatic, but it’s still a good idea from time to time. This may be one of those times.

So here’s what you do: Select the most complex of the shapes (with the most endpoints) by clicking in the middle of it with the white arrow tool, and from the Object menu, select “Flatten Transparency…” Keep checking and unchecking choices until you get (un-gray) the choice of “Clip Complex Regions,” and click that check box. This should break the shape with just the right number of mostly vertical slices, which you won’t see even if you have a stroke, because Illustrator turns the stroke into another object and slices that one too. This is what you import into Toon Boom.

If this automatic method breaks your shape up into more pieces than you think are necessary (and I have no idea how many that is), then you can do it yourself: draw a vertical line all the way through the shape, then select both the shape and the line and use the Pathfinder tool – I forget what they call it offhand (I have Illustrator 10 at home, and CS at work, and they changed the names), but it’s the one on the lower left corner of the pallette. It will cause the vertical line to vanish as it cuts the shape. It will also make some white areas, which you must remove. You don’t have that problem if you just let the program “Clip Complex Regions” for you. This manual method is not a good idea if your shape has a stroke.

The disadvantage of using a shape like this is, if you want to edit the outline in Toon Boom by moving around points, you can’t use points too close to the cut lines, or they’ll show. Other transforms like scaling and skewing should be fine.

Hope that helps. I have no way to test it out, short of downloading the demo Toon Boom. Good luck. And save your original drawings!