To those of you who use my art brush tool, what features or tweaks would you like it to have? Here’s what I’ve got working so far in my development version:
- If a brush was applied in the wrong direction, just run the tool again and it’ll apply it the other way around
- It can now be used in multi-frame editing mode, allowing many strokes to be applied at the same time
- Brushes can be reapplied to a stroke that already has a brush applied to it. Simply select the art brushed stroke symbol on the stage and your new brush symbol in the library and run the tool. Your new brush will be applied in the same direction as the old one.
- Brushes always get applied from upper left to lower right, depending on the relative positions of the stroke’s endpoints.
- Undo.
Some things I’m planning on including but haven’t implemented yet:
- Select a symbol in the library that you’ve used as an art brush. You’ll be able to run a command that automatically updates all the strokes that have had that that brush applied to them. This means that you could change a brush that you’ve already used a bunch, and the tool will go through and make sure everywhere that the brush is used, the stroke looks like the most current version.
- Modify the art brush tool to be able to apply animation, not just a still image, to a series of strokes. (See my previous post about this).
Some things I might do if there’s enough interest in it
- A control panel that changes how the brush is applied – direction of application, whether to scale the width relative to the length, etc.
- A shape-hint-style marker to indicate where to start the stroke
- Smarter decisions about which branch to follow when the path crosses itself.
So let me know what you think. What would you like to see it do? What current behavior annoys you and you’d like to see it fixed?