Custom brushes for map-making

[carygee]

I've been "tracing" a lot of road maps of late using the techniques displayed in an old xaraxone tutorial.

It has occured to me that I could speed things up quite a bit if I could create custom and scaleable brushes for say, an interstate, a main road, secondary road, a coastline etc. And, of course, railroad lines. I've fiddled around with the custom brush tool but all my highways appear to have been hit by scatter bombs.

Is there a simple way to do this in XaraX? My intuition says yes. (I think AI has a railwayline brush that is scaleable)

[carygee]

I've been "tracing" a lot of road maps of late using the techniques displayed in an old xaraxone tutorial.

It has occured to me that I could speed things up quite a bit if I could create custom and scaleable brushes for say, an interstate, a main road, secondary road, a coastline etc. And, of course, railroad lines. I've fiddled around with the custom brush tool but all my highways appear to have been hit by scatter bombs.

Is there a simple way to do this in XaraX? My intuition says yes. (I think AI has a railwayline brush that is scaleable)

[jclements]

Have you tried using circles with a two-colored cicular fill as a basis for a brush?

Or, rather than a brush, blending along a path (which would be the centerline of a road or river?

[raynerj]

carygee,

I have found that lines and layers is the easiest way to go. Here is an example;

[carygee]

Yup. I've been using both lines and layers; I was jsut looking for a faster way to draw thos lines.

Take a highway for instance. I'll draw say, a 6-pt path, clone it, recolor the clone and reduce it to 4-pt to end up with a two color highway with a 1-pt border. I was hoping that a custom brush could produce this effect.

[raynerj]

Sorry Carygee,

I can not help you more than that. Brushes do not give you the control needed that lines do. A blend might work but would take longer than lines.

I will play around a bit and see if I can come up with brush design.

[Egg Bramhill]

Carygee.

I don't see a brush is going to speed up production in any way. If you look at the problem logically, you have to create a line representing the path of the road, whatever method you choose. What could be simplier than cloning this line an altering it's line width and colour?

You could attach a brush to the line, but screen redraw would slow down and you would have the problem of getting smooth cornering etc.

Egg

[Egg Bramhill]

Meanwhile, try experimenting with these brushes. You need to change the line width to suit.
Egg

[carygee]

Thanks Egg!

[RAMWolff44]

I think I know what you need Cary but I'm not sure.

Here's one I just created in the new Xara X1. It works just fine. Pt line set at 8 or 12 is best.