So im working on a shirt design and i used some grunge vectors to cut out texture in my design. So i added the texture in a mask > flattened transparency > cleaned up the weird box it adds. Now my design has abunch of weird little separations - like the whole object is cut into smaller squares and im afraid its going to print that way - so im trying to make the whole object a compound shape, but when i do it ends up deleting half of the object. What am i doing wrong and how can i fix this to make it one big shape?
pictures attached are before and after i hit 'make compound shape'mnm
pictures attached are before and after i hit 'make compound shape'mnm