Vector brushes

[colin_e]

Here is a subject that I know has been discused in the past, but i'm surprised to see doesn't seem to have been raised much recently.

Xara brushes today are essentially equivalent to the "Image spray" tool in a lot of image editing packages, with the added advantage of retaining editability of the line. The key point is each line is made up of a large number of repeated "dabs" of a brush shape, and as the line length and density increases so does the number of dabs, and performance impact (and possibly memory) of the drawing.

In the old days of Xara X and single-core machines with 256MB of memory, line brushes was one of the few functions (the other was complex blends) that I found could easily bring Xara to its knees in terms of performance, or cause a crash.

That doesn't happen so much any more. I honestly don't know whether that's because Xara have made the function more efficient, or whether it's just because we all tend to have a lot more CPU and memory to throw at the problem now, so the point of failure is further away (for those of us who don't tend to do complex artistic drawings) so we generally don't see it.

Anyway, that's a rather lengthy leadup to the main point. Object/Image spray type brushes have their place.

However those of you who remember Creature House Expression, before it was bought-out and essentially killed off (repurposed as a UI design tool) by Microsoft, may recall it's defining feature was "true vector" brushes.

See here for a video demo of how these worked (YouTube).

This is essentially how Xara draws it's inbuilt styles line profiles, stroking the shape profile "on the fly" along the line as a single editable shape, but with the additional capability for the user to edit or define their own custom shapes as line strokes.

Given the similarity to the existing line stroke capability, it seems likely the Xara graphics engine would have the capability to deliver a custom vector brush stroke capability.

Creature House made much of this capability and the support it gave for "natural media" style drawings. Their examples seemed to bear it out, pencil-style sketching and painters brush styles in particular were very effective, and could be applied or edited at any point in the creation of a drawing. Given that Expression is, to all intents and purposes gone as a general-purpose graphics tool, this would seem to leave a gap for Xara to exploit that would significantly expand the creative power of the application.

[handrawn]

I have creature house expression ver 3 [as do several others here - it is often referred to by those who use it as 'E3']

Many if not all of the 'painterly' and 'natural media' style brushes are actually bitmap based not vector

That said, the pure vector brushes are very nice - like you say, they would be welcome in designer and it has been raised before, but I am pretty certain it is not as simple as you make out - you can't tell just by looking, you need to know how the coding is done

[MEB]

Another great addition that was already suggested a few times. Hope they improve the vector and layout core tools instead of adding more web stuff....

[Albacore]

I thought I was the only one that banged on about real vector brushes, I would use Illy's brushes as a good example of the brush that I would like to use. There are more and more people using or trying to use Xara to draw cartoons and it is never very satisfying using the vector line types that we have they all look computer generated. I wholeheartedly back this request!

[ad1066]

+1, most definitely. I installed E3, but have not yet had an opportunity to delve into the interface and make the program really work for me. Having a similar feature available in a program that I already know and love would be excellent.

-- Ben