Curly Plant Mesh - Essential Guide

This page is an essential guide to the "Curly Plant Mesh" tool, a feature used for creating diverse embroidery elements. It provides a comprehensive overview of the tool's capabilities, detailing how to generate various fills, intricate ornaments, and personalized monograms. The tutorial covers key aspects such as defining the shape, controlling the plant's growth and symmetry, utilizing different core elements, and customizing the design with flowers and leaves, offering users a thorough understanding of this powerful creative tool.

How to Create Various Fills, Ornaments, and Monograms with the Curly Plant Mesh Tool

The Curly Plant mode of the Mesh tool is capable of producing many different results. This tutorial aims to illustrate its features and is organized into the following sections:

1. Drawing a Mesh Object
2. Origin Point
3. Fill from Origin Point
4. Options Tab
5. Span
6. Size Levels
7. Overall Scale
8. Ornaments and Monograms
9. Growth Kind
10. Symmetry
11. Irregular Parent Object
12. Seed
13. Base
14. Core
15. Core from Font Glyph
16. Core from Library Glyph
17. Core from Hole Contours
18. Core from Carving Contours
19. Flowers
20. Leaves

Drawing a Mesh Object

Icon of the Mesh tool

Use the Mesh tool to draw a mesh object. The Mesh tool is accessible from the tool bar. In this tutorial, many objects were created using the ellipse (circle) shape. A mesh object can have openings and carvings.

Origin Point

The default location from which the plant fill grows inside the mesh object is called the Origin Point.

The position of the Origin Point is defined during the creation or editing of the Mesh object's vector contours, i.e., in a vectorization mode. While still in the vectorization mode, use pop-up menu > Place > Place Mesh Origin Here to position the Origin Point at the cursor's location.

If an Origin Point is not defined, the geometric center of the object is used as the Origin Point. If the Origin Point is placed outside the object or within its hole, the program may, in some situations, use the nearest point inside the object instead.

Fill from Origin Point

Once the vector boundaries of the mesh object are drawn, its parameters can be adjusted. The default mesh mode is Stippling. Select Plant mode instead, then select Curly Branching instead of the default Plain Branching. Then, generate stitches for this object, leaving the rest of the parameters with their default values. The curly plant fill generated with these parameters starts at the Origin Point and consists of sprouts growing from one another.

As can be seen in the picture above, the default curly plant fill is cropped to the object boundaries, and the boundary contours are also stitched.

Options Tab

Span

The way sprouts crossing the object contours are handled is controlled by the Span control. Possible values are Overflow, Cropped, and Interior.

Overflowing fill collides with object contours. You might want to switch off the stitching of these contours. In such a case, use the Common Mesh Settings to exclude contours.

Size Levels

A curly plant is built with 1 to 8 size levels of sprouts, where level 1 is the smallest and level 8 is the largest. Sprouts belonging to the same level are not identical in size; they vary within a certain range to achieve a more organic look. The selection of size levels affects the homogeneity of the sprouts' layout.

Overall Scale

Overall Scale works like a zoom tool for sprouts. This control allows you to increase or decrease the size of all sprouts (all size levels of sprouts). It affects all sprouts, including leaves and flowers. It does not affect the base and core, which have their own scale control, or their size is fixed. Indirectly, the overall scale also increases or decreases the empty space between the sprouts.

Ornaments and Monograms

Previous examples illustrate the plant growing autonomously from the origin point, resulting in the fill of the entire mesh object. The term "autonomously" means that the plant's growth is not managed. However, the Growth Kind control allows you to select other ways for the plant to grow, which are managed in some way. These introduce rotational symmetry and mirroring. Instead of filling the parent mesh object, they produce a decorative object or ornament that uses the parent mesh object as a shape template. Also, the plant may grow from a vector object, or multiple vector objects, not just from a single point. If a letter glyph is used as a core from which the plant grows, the resulting mesh may look like a monogram.

Growth Kind

The Growth Kind control in the Options Tab allows you to choose how the plant's growth starts and whether it is managed (symmetry, mirroring) or not.

Symmetry

Growth kinds can be divided into 4 groups, as illustrated in the diagram above. Let's start with growth #3, which uses symmetrical sectors. The point of symmetry is identical to the Origin Point.

Rotational symmetry with 3 sectors. The source sector is painted in red.

Source Sector

The sprouts grow in just one sector of the mesh object (circle, in this case). This sector is called the source sector. The default source sector is the bottom-left one, marked with red in the picture above. The source sector can be changed using the control Source Sector for Symmetry. Sprouts from the source sector are copied around the Origin Point to other sectors. The parent mesh object does not need to have a circular shape. The shape of the source sector is used in all other sectors, regardless of their actual shape.

To avoid excessive density, the inner sprouts might not meet at the Origin Point. In such cases, the sprouts are connected at another appropriate nearest point.

Rotational symmetry can be combined with mirroring across the side of a sector. Again, the source sector is the red one. The rest of the sectors are its rotated and mirrored copies.

Rotational symmetry combined with mirroring

Mirroring. In this example, a base object was used to grow sprouts from. The Origin Point is intentionally placed below the geometric center of the shape to make the base asymmetric with respect to the horizontal axis.

Rotational symmetry combined with mirroring.

Below are more examples of rotational symmetry and mirroring.

Irregular Parent Object

As mentioned before, plants with rotational symmetry and/or mirroring take their shape from one part of the parent mesh object. This part is called the source sector. The rest of the plant consists of rotated or mirrored copies of the source sector. This section illustrates how it works.

The mesh object on which we are going to demonstrate symmetry and mirroring is intentionally irregular. The Growth Kind is set to Mirror with 3x Rotational Symmetry.

The plant grows only in the source sector, and this is also the only place where plant growth respects the parent object's contours. In this example, the sprouts grow from two bases (predefined vector objects). The bases are highlighted in dark and bright blue. Please notice how the bases are deformed as a result of the asymmetric shape of the source sector.

The program mirrors the plant from the source sector to achieve reflectional symmetry of the source sector and its neighbor. Then, copies of both of these sectors are revolved to fill the rest of the sectors. Please notice that the contours of the parent objects are taken into account only when growing the source sector fill and are ignored in all other sectors.

Seed

Seed is a starting value for the random generator of the plant. Different seed values result in different sizes and layouts of sprouts, flowers, and leaves while keeping all other settings preserved. The seed value can be set with a numerical control or with the up and down arrow buttons. The buttons allow for a quick change of the seed and also apply the new seed value (generate stitches for the mesh object).

In other words, click the seed arrow button to obtain a different variant of the plant fill.

Base Tab

The Growth Kind (control in the Options Tab) with symmetry allows you to use either the Origin Point or a vector template called Base as a platform for sprouts to grow from. The Base is a pre-digitized sample projected onto each sector of the symmetrical plant. While sprouts are random, the pre-digitized symmetrical bases bring a sense of order and formality to the plant ornament.

A user can use up to 4 bases in a single curly plant mesh. If no base is used, the sprouts grow from the Origin Point. If one or more bases are used, the sprouts grow from these bases.

Bases form rings of different sizes and widths around the Origin Point. Each base has its own adjustable parameters: Kind (Sample), Size, and Width. Size and Width allow you to tweak the bases to achieve the desired layout. Bases may intersect each other.

Mesh objects are monochrome; the colors in these illustrations were added only to differentiate the bases (red, orange, and green) from the leaves (violet).

You can create an ornament with just bases and no sprouts if you set the Maximum Sprout Generations to zero.

Core Tab

Core is another kind of pre-digitized vector platform for growing sprouts from. Unlike the base, the core can be asymmetric and even user-defined (with the use of holes and carvings of the parent mesh object). There are four types of core:

1. from a single font glyph
2. from a single library glyph
3. from holes of the parent mesh object
4. from carvings of the parent mesh object

1. Core from Font Glyph

2. Core from Library Glyph

All pre-digitized library core glyphs (type #2) allow mirroring of the sprouts that grow from them. Other core types do not allow mirroring, regardless of their shape.

3. Core from Hole Contours

The core from hole contours has a fixed size and cannot be scaled.

4. Core from Carving Contours

The core from carving contours has a fixed size and cannot be scaled.

Please see the detailed tutorial describing advanced techniques on how to use carving cores in a curly plant mesh.

Flowers Tab

Some sprouts can be converted to flowers. There are two kinds of flowers available:

1. flowers generated from font glyphs
2. predefined flowers from the library

Although the font glyphs are intended mainly for fonts containing floral clipart, they also allow you to use any other letters or symbols instead of flowers. Besides common font styles like Bold and Italic, there is also a Rotation control available, which rotates the glyph with respect to the parent sprout. Flowers have their own Scale control for adjusting their size. Also, there is a Compression control which allows you to make the bottom part of the flower narrower.

The maximum number of flowers is roughly controlled with the Amount parameter. However, the exact number of flowers cannot be guaranteed as their placement is pseudo-random.

Multiple flowers can be used in a single object.

Leaves Tab

Some sprouts can be turned into objects resembling leaves. There are several kinds of leaves available, with different overall shapes. Leaves have adjustable Width, Length, and Curliness. The Curliness is a measure of how much the leaves are bent into a spiral shape.