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I am trying to adjust the options in the brush presets menu and then apply the brush to a circular path using the "stroke path" command in the path menu. My brush is a few hair shapes and I want it to apply to the circle path so that the consequence is what looks like a hairy circle with all hairs pointing out. That would mean the brush applied to the path so that it's base stayed perpendicular relative to the base path of the circle. So far I have not found that setting. As of yet I can only get the brush to apply to the circle in one initial direction so while the hairiness looks great at the top of the circle (hairs pointing out from the circle) while on the sides, the hairs are sideways relative to the circle path and at the bottom the top of the hairy brush actually points in towards the center of the circle. Can someone please tell me the specific control in the brush palette which controls this and can make the brush apply to the path is a dynamic way to keep the position consistent? Thanks.
Set the angle jitter control to "Direction."
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OK. So me again. First issue finally resolved. Sorry. I had a pen tilt command in the size jitter field selected which was messing the whole thing up. Now a second challenge. The rendering of the brush is showing up centered top top bottom of the brush relative to the circle path. Is there any way to apply a baseline shift so the base of the hairs render more closely to the line of the circle path?
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The following is a solution I offered to solve a similar problem. Essentially, drawing a straight line and then converting it into a circle. (In the case below, the objective was a fading line in a circle.) I have modified the instructions listed below so that they apply to your project..
1. Draw a centered horizontal bar on a blank layer. Note that it extends from one side to the other side of the square.
2. Select > All. Filter >Distort > Polar Coordinates…Rectangular to Polar
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Set the angle jitter control to "Direction."
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That takes care of the first part. Any insight on how to effect where the baseline of the brush gets rendered relative to the target path? Using your image of the hairs, how might you offset the hairs so they occurred almost entirely outside the circular path?
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I don't believe there is a way to do this with the brush settings. There are two ways to get around this: one is to use the Deco fill script following a path, but modify the script to include some randomness - not an easy method. The other method is when you create your hair brush, make the canvas twice the length, and place a 1px dot at 2% opacity the same distance from the end of the hair as is the length of the hair. This will put the center of the brush at the end of the hair, but the very fair dot will not show up, unless you have a lot of overlapping hairs, which in that case, you could make a selection inside of the path and delete the dots. I drew a rectangle to the size of the hair, then moved it down to show where to put the small dot.
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Thanks Chuck. Very succinct and helpful. Best in the New Year to you.
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Hi Again Chuck, Still trying to fully understand the custom brush presets experience and I am hoping I can trouble you for one more piece of guidance. I have now progressed to the point where I have a set of brushes which are very close to what I need. My remaining problem is that, even with the "count" set at the minimum in the brushes "scatter" menu, there are too many occurrences of the brush side to side relative to each other (the hairs are too close together). I have tried recreating the base jpg that I am defining as the brush so that there is much more background but that does not seem to be working. My understanding is that all jpgs that get defined into brushes should be square so in the case of a thin set of hairs there is plenty of background side to side. Any insight as to how I might modify the base jpg in order to increase the resulting spread of the final rendering? Thanks once again in advance for sharing your expertise.
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You want to adjust the spacing, which is on the main tab of the brush panel. All that matters is black to gray areas of the brush. White areas don't do anything and are clipped when making the brush.
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So in CS3 these are my choices.
And this:
Spacing is not an option but scattering is although minimized. Am I daft? Where's the spacing?
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Got it. Did not realize "Brush Tip Shape" was a clickable option. Thank you again.
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So now another issue. Settings look like this:
But the result is this:
Why are some hair lying sideways or inside the circle if angle jitter is "direction" and 0 and the brush preview displays perfectly lined up?
Sorry. Am I driving you crazy yet? So many settings to keep track of and the result sometimes is not the expected one!
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Umm, that's odd. Only thing I can think of is that the brush actual dimensions are close to being square and that might throw PS off as to what is the correct direction, but I'm doubting that is it. What settings do you have on the scattering panel?
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Hi again Chuck, Thanks again so much for your patient and thorough responses. So hard to forensically peel back the layers of so complicated onion and I thank you for your patience. I did figure out what was going on and wanted to get back to you and put it here in this thread for the future reference of many. The path which I was trying to stroke with the brush had been originally created from a selection in Photoshop using the "Make Path" command and the consequence was a pretty terrible piece of vector art. When I replaced it with a clean circle drawn in Illustrator the brush applied perfectly. Hope that's it for my issues here. Thanks you once again.
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Yea, that would do it!