Rivet lines...

[Motherland]

How do you guys do rivet lines? Theres no way Im doing them one by one... Is there some kind of tool or something that would make that easier? Im using GIMP...

[Xasthur]

I believe there is a way you can adjust your line tool to 'print' a series of dots at set intervals.

This is how many, such as Fencer (who suggested this to me), save time doing thier rivets.

I should investigate the line tool in Photoshop but I've never gotten around to it.

The way I have done it is to copy and paste a lot of it.

You'll need to merge your layers regularly so that you don't end up with 5 million layers of rivets but other than that.... it's pretty simple.

Once you've done the black rivets you can just 'load selection', move the selection down 1 pixel and fill that white. That will dupilcate what you've done and make it white.

[Krusty]

Spacing % on a brush or pencil tool defaults to 20%. When you use a 1-pixel brush size and set it to 400% or 500%, that means it will repeat one instance of the brush for every 4x (or 5x) the width of that brush.

It means it'll draw a line but only with every 4th/5th pixel.


Click once, shift click a second time, and draw multisegmented lines where you want.

[Motherland]

Originally posted by Krusty
Spacing % on a brush or pencil tool defaults to 20%. When you use a 1-pixel brush size and set it to 400% or 500%, that means it will repeat one instance of the brush for every 4x (or 5x) the width of that brush.

It means it'll draw a line but only with every 4th/5th pixel.


Click once, shift click a second time, and draw multisegmented lines where you want.

Cool, thanks!

[Greebo]

I just create a row of 1 pixel dots using copy and paste. The usual spacing is 1 dot then a three pixel gap. You can paste this line almost as quickly as you can draw it with a draw tool.

One tip is to create two layers of rivet lines, one with all the horizontal lines and one with all the vertical ones. This makes them much easier to edit, particularly if you initially make each layer's rivets a different colour.

For angled lines or curved rivet lines I place each dot by hand and put them on the vertical rivets layer.

Once I'm happy with the rivets' positions I merge the two layers into one which forms the basis of 4 or 5 other rivet effect layers.

[Stoney74]

For GIMP, the "Path" tool has the ability to do custom line types, i.e. a dashed line that is user defined.  The best part about it is that on curved and diagonal sections, the rivets will wind up anti-aliased (am I using the proper terminology?) and won't appear to drift.