[Illustrator] Stairway along a path

[Carnifex]

Made in Illustrator. The stairs follow a path. 100% vector. Now I have to solve the shadowing so it looks nice.

Made for the "Dungeon of the Day" project.

flexible-stairs.jpg

[Meshon]

Cool. I am a big fan of producing stuff like this in Illustrator. It can really speed things up and can be transported to GIMP or PS for additional awesome

[markem]

That is really neat! Was it hard to do? If not this technique could also be used to make things like rope bridges. :-)

[Meshon]

It's not too hard to do either in Illustrator or Inkscape (though I admit my experience with the latter is limited). In Illustrator you basically draw one piece, whatever that might be (a stair, a link of chain, a section of cobblestone street, a short stretch of wall) and then make it into a brush. Usually a pattern brush, but I've also done some things with scatter brushes. There's a section on doing it for streets in the pdf of my Cobblestone Streets tutorial (in my sig). You can also find a whole bunch of good tutorials around.

In Inkscape I think it was called Pattern along path, and it's a similar process. Make the object and then tell the software to repeat it along a path. I'm not sure if you can save them as brushes like you can in AI, but it's certainly doable.
Have fun! I'm looking forward to seeing your rope bridge

Now I have to solve the shadowing so it looks nice.

I agree, this is a tricky thing to do, especially because you want it to look right even when it goes around corners. Also, is your flagstone background done in Illustrator? It's very nice!

cheers,
Meshon

[Carnifex]

It's not too hard to do either in Illustrator or Inkscape (though I admit my experience with the latter is limited). In Illustrator you basically draw one piece, whatever that might be (a stair, a link of chain, a section of cobblestone street, a short stretch of wall) and then make it into a brush. Usually a pattern brush, but I've also done some things with scatter brushes. There's a section on doing it for streets in the pdf of my Cobblestone Streets tutorial (in my sig). You can also find a whole bunch of good tutorials around.

In Inkscape I think it was called Pattern along path, and it's a similar process. Make the object and then tell the software to repeat it along a path. I'm not sure if you can save them as brushes like you can in AI, but it's certainly doable.
Have fun! I'm looking forward to seeing your rope bridge


I agree, this is a tricky thing to do, especially because you want it to look right even when it goes around corners. Also, is your flagstone background done in Illustrator? It's very nice!

cheers,
Meshon

I guess I have to do shadowing Separately for each stair. Pattern brushes dont like raster effects it seems?
Yes, flagstones are made in Ai (in the line of maps I make now everything is made in Ai!).

[Carnifex]

Small update... added shadows - might look easy to do but actually quite tricky...

flexible-stairs_02_shade.jpg

[Meshon]

This is great! Are the shadows on the stairs part of the brush? Also just want to mention again that your background elements are really nice, you've inspired me to look again at Illustrator to do some patterns and such. And talk about thinking outside the box… I have a brush that I use for stone walls as well, but I don't know if I ever would have considered making one for cliffs. Very inspirational!

cheers,
Meshon

[Carnifex]

The stairs are a graphical style that combines several brushes and effects. The steps are one brush. The basic shadow effect is actually a broad line (that fits over the stairs) with a gradient and then set to multiply

The cliffs are not yet made into a brush/graphic style - but I will do it when I have time.

[Meshon]

Thanks for laying that out. I have managed to build useful graphic styles a grand total of twice, but there's a lot of power there. Thanks for answering all my questions, and again for inspiring me to keep pushing the possibilities.

cheers,
Meshon

[Carnifex]

Graphic styles are very easy to build and very easy to use.