Tumbleweed

So, I've made a little progress on the MapThing suite recently. Unfortunately it's not on HillThing though.

After recently spending an inordinately long time drawing, redrawing and shading a simple border I decided that I'd have a crack at automating some of the process. So I finally turned my attention to the newly re-christened BorderControl module for MapThing.

It's not feature-complete yet but I thought there was enough now to show a little of what it can do. So, first up a few examples...

Here is a simple boder created in the program with a few shadows and highlights added.



Next up, the exact same border imported into PS over several layers and the blend modes meddled with..



And lastly just a few more styles that can be easily accomplished in the program.



Elements are placed by simply dragging a box over the viewer and releasing. It automatically resizes the length of the neatline cells to suit the dimensions - either automatically adjusting the number of cells on the Y-axis and keeping the lengths equal or allowing it to be manually set for different scales on X and Y.

It can also add corner panels, grids, rhumb lines and a cartouche panel.

I have yet to add the ability to tile a pattern around the pattern bar element and I also want to add a simple pattern creator for helping me to make celtic knot style borders.

As it is though it's really easy to create a border in a few seconds and along with an action saved in PS or Gimp it's possible to create a nice border in a minute. Maybe not as big a time-saver as TreeThing can be but a time saver for me nevertheless.