How should orient a pattern?

[Luigi]

Hi everyone, I have to draw some roads for maps with gimp, I was thinking of using a path and outlining it with a pattern, but I can’t orient the pattern on the curves of the path. In short I’ll post a photo of the results I want to obtain, do you know what tools I should use in gimp to have a similar effect? PS I know there are tools ready to download, but I wanted to learn how to do it…

[LaurenceFinston]

Does it have to be GIMP? While GIMP has features for drawing, I think that it’s more designed for post-processing photos and other graphics. I use it mostly for processing drawings, but I don’t use it for making the drawings themselves.

There are any number of drawing packages available. For what it’s worth, I would use MetaPost for this application. However, it’s quite possible that somebody would prefer using GIMP for it.

[gwidion (João Sebastião de Oliveira Bueno)]

It is possible to get some of the effects, but not with the best results, if you configure a painting dynamics and enable the “rotation X direction” toggle (indicating direction of painting will affect the brush rotation", and then toggle the “emulate dynamics” in the stroke-path dialog. (the pre-defined “track direction” dynamics does that)

It should be good for stand-alone strokes, but it can’t “curve the strokes” themselves like in some of these examples.

For continuous painting you have to: stroke with a continuous, solid color, in a temporary layer, them select this stroke, so that you have a pattern bordering the original, and then you can stroke this last selection - this can yield something similar to your second to last example.

[RobA (Rob Antonishen)]

The simplest way is to just stroke paths using combinations of stroke styles and dashes.

For example, your “outlined” road can be created by stroking once theb stroking a second time with a 2 or 3 px narrower stroke either with the erase tool or the background colour.

The dashes roads can be done in similar ways with dash strokes.

FWIW, I stopped using Gimp for making my fantasy map roads, boarders, and labels, and use Inkacape.

Rob A.

[Luigi]

Thanks everyone for the suggestions. The image I posted is a set of brushes for gimp taken from deviantart. I’ll try to build a brush for gimp and use inkscape but I have to learn from scratch. Metapost scares me a bit. Thanks again.

[LaurenceFinston]

There’s nothing to be scared of about MetaPost. However, it would be off-topic for this forum. There is a mailing list for MetaPost, though: MetaPost - TeX Users Group

[Luigi]

Sorry, I meant to say that I will try Joao’s dynamics and Rob’s double tracking, I will also take a look at metapost…

[Ofnuts]

Very often you achieve this by stroking the path several times, for instance this:

Is the result of stroking a continuous black line:

And then stroking a slightly narrower dashed white line over it:

For a double dashed line:

You would first stroke a wide dashed line:

Then add a layer mask and stroke a narrower continuous line on the mask(*):

For more complex stuff, I have a bunch of scripts that can be useful, some of them are put in action in this tutorial.

(*) the dash lengths are proportional to the line width, so it is near impossible to align the dashes of two lines that have different widths, but here you can use a continuous line on the mask, it will just make transparent things that already are so.

[Luigi]

Wonderful, very interesting, thanks a lot!