textures as brushes

[slowtiger]

Not really something to share here, but a maybe useful tip:

Recently I had to do a lot of "living textures" in a way that I couldn't just simply use a stencil and some image files. I decided to draw the textures with an animated brush. See the attached image for what's possible to do. The brushes consist of 5 to 30 drawings (the felt tip pen on tissue paper has 128!). Mostly I use random playback. The curly ones use random rotation. The crosshatchings don't rotate at all.

I can't really use larger brushes for drawing because of my slow Mac, and they all don't use anti-alias for the same reason. But I found them quite useful, especially for colour work where I can stack several layers of slightly different colour.

[Svengali]

A couple more tips...

I've been working with cutbrush and animbrush tools extensively for several years now for stroke-as-object drawing and for texturing.

1. Many of my texture brushes start as a simple single cutbrush then enhanced by using Random as the setting for size, direction and/or intensity.

2. Any cutbrush consisting of multiple colors (I do a lot of brushes that combine black, gray and white) can be turned into a two-tone color brush simply by setting the "Options>Select Color Mode" to Luma Invert. This will use the APen for darks and BPen for lights and blend the two for all intermediate grays. Curiously, setting it to Luma inverts the colors and setting it to Hue uses the APen color to create a full-range monochrome version of the cutbrush's values.

To force a cutbrush into LumaInvert Mode insert a command line in the button definition for the brush, right after the Custom Brush line that says:

ForceLumaInvert.jpg (8.94 KiB) Viewed 1865 times

Stamp 2 (= Luma)
Stamp 4 (= Luma Invert)
Stamp 5 (= Hue)

Sven

[ZigOtto]

thanks for your tips, Sven.

Stamp 2 (= Luma)
Stamp 4 (= Luma Invert)
Stamp 5 (= Hue)

though I get Hue with Stamp 3 (and not 5),
here's the modes repartition :
- Stamp 1 (= Alpha)
- Stamp 2 (= Luma)
- Stamp 3 (= Hue)
- Stamp 4 (= Luma Invert)
- Stamp 5 (= Alpha Max)
- Stamp 6 (= Smear)

[Elodie]

thanks for sharing your work =)

[Svengali]

though I get Hue with Stamp 3 (and not 5)

I'm sure you're right... I normally use Luma Invert but several of the other options looked useful too!

Sven