Railworks America

I wanted to share this with everyone. It's a short tutorial about the way I make darts and swooping objects for repaints.

I used a trial version of a program to convert to a .pdf file, so it has watermarks all over it. the information is clear and not affected.

This url invalid because Comcrap shut down all user webpages - Sorry!

I'd like feedback on this, to see if it needs further expansion.

You can use LibreOffice or OpenOffice to convert doc files to pdf's, and both are free and great replacements of Microsoft Office.

I prefer LibreOffice of the two.

Ingenious, I'd like to introduce to another way though, using the GIMP Path tool. It's nowhere near as useful as the Photoshop one, sadly ( you can use it for masks in Photoshop ) but it's designed for making arbitrarily curved shapes.

So, make a new layer or however you work.



Click the Paths button, or tap the B key.




Click to make a rough outline of your shape, don't worry about the connecting lines for now. Using bezier curves ( which is what paths are ) takes some practice - quite often you will find you've used too many points. You must make a point at sharp corners; make one inbetween if there is a very large gap or if there's some complex changes in direction. Use Ctrl-click on the first point to close the shape. Now let's make some curves.



Hold down ctrl, click on a point and drag the mouse away. While you're doing this, hold shift down so that you get the handle on the other side of the point to appear too. You can think of Bezier handles as magnets that attract the line towards them - if you want more detailed information there's tons of it around, bezier curves are popular tools. Anyway, wiggle the points around until you have a nice smooth curve from each corner. Do the same with the other curve points.



Unfortunately unless I've missed something - I am not a habitual GIMP user - you can't actually do anything with a path directly, so now we're going to turn it into a selection. The button for this is in the tool palette on the left.

Once you have a selection...



... then it's easy to see what to do.



Bezier curves take a bit of getting used to - especially visualising how many points you need - but well worth the effort.

I figured I'd sticky this for a while.

I can't help thinking that this a place where INKSCAPE could shine.

It, being a vector drawing tool, excels at being able to draw complex curves (bezier curves, node rotation, very cool text manipulations, etc)

http://inkscape.org/

pwillard wrote:I can't help thinking that this a place where INKSCAPE could shine.

It, being a vector drawing tool, excels at being able to draw complex curves (bezier curves, node rotation, very cool text manipulations, etc)

http://inkscape.org/

Thanks Pete!

Wow! That is amazing stuff! And the tools were right there the whole time. I am a Gimp fan and any new tutorials is much appreciated!

From what I have seen many of these programs have a bunch of plugins that people have made over the years that give them all more functionally similar to photoshop. Try hunting around the web and you may find something that makes your life much easier... Just be careful as always. That Vector tool for instance I believe is sometimes known as the pen tool.