Well here I am again. I know how to make a cable and bend curves and angles in it but what I need to do is a little more complex. I live in the great state of Texas and am building a site for a rope company. I would like to make a rope graphic in the shape of Tx. What would be the easiest way to do this? start out will a stright peice of rope and start to bend it around the shap? Or start out with the shape and turn it into the rope? One of the small problems I am having is the rope itself. Making metal cable or wire is easy but making that look like rope is a bitch. I have found a tut on making a coil of rope but again getting it in the shape of texas is harder than I thought it would be. What you guys think?

That's when something like Corel Photo-Paint comes in handy with it's image sprayers which includes different ropes.

Or Illustrator with its rope brushes.

Well, I decided to give this a try and hopefully its close to what you had in mind. Firstly, we need to create a custom brush with rope texture then take this brush and manipulate its characteristics so that it flows along with your stylus (mouse cursor). Now this works better if you have a drawing tablet since it affords you better control in tracing around your Texas map.

What I did was to scan an image from a knot tying book I have of a rope drawing and used that as the basis of my brush texture with some manipulation to better confine the brush along its flow. I isolated by selection a part of the rope image that gave a good look of the rope texture using 3 wraps of the rope. I skewed the 3 wraps by squashing them together towards the center. I then elongated this by scaling vertically slightly. I now had my brush texture. I then selected my texture. In the edit menu I clicked on define brush and it was entered into my brush palette.

Now to manipulate the brushs characteristics I clicked on the brush palette. In the brush tip shape section I used the spacing slider so that the brush texture butted together end to end and then used the rotation tool to align the brushs tip to give as smooth a flow as possible and checked on smoothing.

I now clicked on brush dynamics and left size and roundness jitter to off and leaving angle jitter to 0% I set the control for direction.

I then gave my new brush a test run to see how it would behave. Not perfect but whatever doesnt flow correctly, you could then go in and post edit those sections to your liking later.

Now to secure the outline of the State of Texas for the next phase.

I downloaded some time ago some ready made map outlines of the U.S. from the Internet and decided to use part of this in building my outline.

After some cleaning up I had my outline of the state of Texas. To make a tracing of the outline with my new brush. But before doing that I needed to increase my map size from 800x600 to something larger which would make my post editing easier and if it needed to be put out later to a print output, I resized my map to 3400x2550. I then colored my outline a nice green to pull it away from the background.

After some trial brush sizes I began to trace my map on a new layer. Didnt like that size so I scaled my brush down and traced again. I thought that was better. After finishing my trace, I went back to post edited my rope texture and slapped Texas on my map. Hope this is of some help to youI had fun experiementing.

P.S. You could probably use some drop shadow on your rope to give it a more 3D look.

Message edited on: 01/16/2006 19:56

Oh BTW, I forgot to ask, since this is my first incursion into flow brushes, if anyone knows of a better way or at least some good tutorials to secure more accurate brush flows?

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=459094

That's pretty good in Photoshop! And no, I don't know of a better way in Photoshop -- I'm still on v6.0 -- but your way is excellent in and of itself. Illustrator has very accurate brush flows, AND it allows corners and endings in the custom art brushes, so what I normally do if I need a flow brush type of thing is I bring the image into AI as a template and trace where I want the "rope", then bring the "rope" into Photoshop as a separate layer over the image. That's what I did for the trimming and the celtic knot chains for Temptress -- link above, but NOT SAFE FOR VIEWING AT WORK.

Very nicely done Aprilgem! Here, using the Photoshop brush flow control I made this belly-chain for her.

Try this way, make the brush like quest has explained. Than draw the texas with the pen tool and save the path. Select the path and apply brush type stroke. Uncheck the simulate pressure box, and one more thing, select the rope brush before you go to stroke and you`ll get perfect rope outline :) Tihomir

Tantarus, thank you so very much for shedding light on that feature. So it was back to the drawing board but this time instead of using the free flowing brush, I needed to draw a path using the pen tool. We still setup our custom brush as I described earlier. If you merely select the Texas map outline and convert that to a path, when you apply the custom brush youll get helter-skelter along the path because the map has too many undulations going in different directions. So what one needs to do is simplify the path.

Drawing with the pen tool on a new layer and the map on the layer underneath, lightening the opacity so that we can use the map as a reference when we trace over it, follow the general shape of the map using as little vertices as possible. This creates the path. Then, using the direct selection tool, the delete anchor point tool and the convert point tool we edit the path selecting and deleting unnecessary vertices and converting all the vertices from corner anchors to bier for a more rounded, smooth appearance.

Having already setup the custom brush and its properties from our prior experiment all you need do is click the stroke path with brush icon located at the bottom of the path palette. If the brush needs altering or you want to select a different brush, hitting Ctrl+Z will undo the stroke, make your changes then click the stroke path again. As Tantarus suggests, uncheck the simulate pressure box. To do this, while holding down the Alt key, mouse click the stroke path with brush icon.

Love the chain, Quest! And good teamwork on the modified Photoshop rope! :)

Im glad that I could help, one more thing about the paths. Since the texas is very rough shape it would take forever to make the path perfect manualy. So select the shape with standard selection (magic wand, color range, etc.) and with the selection still active go to paths pallete and click on "make work path from selection", that should instantly make the path from youre selection :) Tihomir

Oh, making the map selection is no problem at all, in fact, that was the easiest part. The hardest part was trying to get the brush to behave the way you want it to with such a complicated, undulating map outline. That's why the outline path has to be simplified, for better control of the brush. Still, even with the simplified path, some small amount of post editing is required. Using the manual flow brush method as I described in the first attempt will give you a more detailed, conforming texture closer to the irregular outline of the map but with much more post editing. Although you can get the texture to wrap around the shape using a manual flow brush, the task becomes faster and cleaner with less post editing using the simplified path as the drive for the custom brush.

wow!! I had to leave town on business and came back to this! I never expected this kind of responce. You guys are a god send.