Metaball-Arc uses arcs to connect. Metaball uses suitable bezier curves.

How To Use

1. Draw some circles and select them, then run this script.
2. When a prompt appears, type in an optional value for the the connecting curves, then click OK.

It doesn’t check in the script whether each path is really a circle. So have fun with other shapes…

Combining the shapes using Pathfinder may results several overlapping anchor points on the path. if it occurs, it may help to solve it to use my another script “Merge Overlapped Anchors.js”. (See above)

How To Install

Runing Illustrator script

Is easy – press CMD+F12 or CTR+F12 (File>Other Script). However, if you want to have it accessible under Files>Scripts, its more complicated. But now there’s a script for that! Try it here script to open Scripts folder in AI or read on..

A bit less known way to launch script:

Just drag and drop the script file onto the Illustrator top area. If you drag it to the area of the open document, the script may not start. Warning message might pop up.

Unzip!

Illustrator understands scripts with

.vbs

.js
.jsx
.jsxbin

file extensions. Whilst .js and .jsx are plain text files, .jsxbin is proprietary binary format. If you script is in archive – .zip, .rar, you should unarchive your script file after downloading.  

It also could be scripted using AppleScript, but here we focus on JavaScript version of language Adobe uses – ExtendScript.