How to "finalize" a blend (blend tool)

Question

I'm creating a blend between two shapes with a 1px spacing, which by itself takes quite a bit of memory considering they're somewhat far apart.

After I make the blend, I want to expand or somehow make it uneditable, thereby releasing memory (I don't need to edit the blend anymore, so I just want to "finish" it into one single shape).

Does anyone know how I can do that?

I've tried going to Object > Blend > Expand, but that doesn't work because there are too many shapes in between and I get a memory error. Any ideas?

Edit: I'm sorry I didn't say this upfront. What I'm creating is the famous "long shadow" effect for an entire phrase for an ad (say 5-6 words...). I've researched how I could do this and I found 2 methods: one uses the Effect > Transform, and make copies up to 1000 with 1px distance from one another, and the second method I found simply using the Blend Tool and also making copies with 1px distance from each other, however the latter method is not limited to 1000 copies. Perhaps I'll have to make just as long shadows as to be able to stretch them further using the pen tool, word by word? :(

Thank you for your support so far, I hope this clarifies the problem.

Answer 1

Drawing a blend in a vector format to make a gradient is not very effective as you may have noticed. But there are 2 things you can do:

1. Rasterize it to pixels (Object → Rasterize). You will lose all the benefits of vector drawing however. Also this will blow in memory too.

2. Instead of using a blend use gradient meshes.

Image 1: Blend of hundreds of lines and a very light gradient mesh (right)