How can I add shapes to anchor points in illustrator?

Question

I'm trying to make a connected dots background quite similar to this.

What I'm doing is using the pen tool to make triangles and then manually dragging circles to the anchor points, is there an easier way?

I've tried using circular arrowheads, but they only seem to affect one point in each triangle.

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

I have found an imperfect way to do this, it has some problems but it is a start.

I use the properties of the Dashed Stroke :

• Weight determines the radius of the dots
• Cap and Corner are both set to rounded
• The buttons to the right of Dashed Line allow the dashes to be aligned to the corers.
• Setting the dash length to 0.1pt makes a dash with rounded ends into a nearly-perfect circle
• If the gap length is set to an amount that is longer than any of the line segments, the dashes will only appear on the corners (Because we set them to align with corners)

Then we have a stroke that looks like this:

I use the Appearance panel to add a new stroke - and change the settings on the new stroke back to your standard settings you were using before.

to achieve a stroke that looks like this:

If this Appearance is applied to your matrix of triangles (I used a Graphic Style) it should add dots to all of the corners. You can see some imperfections in my example, but perhaps with some fine tuning they could be minimized.

Answer 2

I know this is an old post. But I found something that might help. It's a script for Illustrator from:

http://shspage.com/aijs/en/#dup_at

and you want to use the "Dup At Selected Anchors" script :) All the info is in the link above.