How do I combine paths to make a clipping mask in Illustrator?

Question

designing some van livery and have been provided with a template file (screenshot) however, the car's outline has been created with numerous paths / lines and I'm struggling to create one outline to create a clipping mask from.

Unless I'm doing it wrong, I've tried to unite paths / join / outline stroke / make compound path etc etc to no avail. When I try to fill the car outline with colour, it's either a rectangle shape OR nothing (Illustrator says the path is too complex)

Can someone offer any help? Admittedly Illustrator is not my strongest skill so perhaps I'm missing something?

Answer 1

CAD drawings imported into Ai are usually insanely complex. It's just the nature of how CAD programs work; they use such a different object model under the hood than Ai's Postscript heritage that a CAD designer's dream tends to be an Ai user's nightmare.

If you were lucky enough to get a file that retained the original CAD layers, you should first turn off all the layers that don't apply to your project.

Either way, I think there's a preliminary step that will make your life a lot easier: go through each of the individual plan and elevation drawings and copy just the paths you need onto a new layer. There's a huge amount of extraneous (for your purposes) detail in the CAD, and throwing it away will allow Illustrator to do its thing without hitting that complexity barrier you've run into.

Once you have copied the paths you need, you can lock or hide the CAD layer(s).

This approach has the benefit of making changes and edits far easier as the project moves to completion.