Envelope distort messing up shapes

Question

I'm working on an art request with a race car, and have been provided with a vector file of the design that's printed on the side of the actual car. However, I can't seem to get envelope distort > make with mesh to work properly. Here is the art I need to fit onto the side of the car I've drawn: But when I try to use envelope distort, some of my shapes change, like this: It's as if some of the points have been deleted or moved for some reason. I can't find anything unusual about the shapes that are doing this, no compound paths, clipping masks, or embeded images, and I've tried ungrouping everything, grouping everything, hitting expand a couple times, and relaunching Illustrator, all to no effect.

Has anyone ever seen anything similar? Any fixes beyond redrawing everything?

Answer 1

Looks like you may have some fidelity issues...

Open up the envelope options (Object → Envelope Distort → Envelope Options...) and make sure that the fidelity is set to "100".

Compare this vaguely recreated artwork distorted with "0" fidelity:

...and "100" fidelity:

This can also happen regardless of the fidelity setting if the artwork you're distorting is too small (your example would have to be no more than a few points wide for this to be the case); if that's the case you can just scale up your artwork to a point where it distorts as it should, then expand (Object → Envelope Distort → Expand) and reduce the size again (or work at a more reasonable size to begin with, if you aren't already).