Curly Plant Mesh - Essential Guide

How to create various fills, ornaments and monograms with Curly Plant Mesh tool

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

1. Drawing 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 Mesh Object

Use mesh tool from the tool bar to draw a mesh object. In this tutorial, many objects were created with ellipse (circle) shape . Mesh object can have holes and carvings.

Origin Point

Default place from which the plant fill grows inside the mesh object is called Origin Point .

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

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

Fill from Origin Point

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

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

Options Tab

Span

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

Overflow of fill collides with object contours. You may want to switch off stitching of these contours. In such a case, use common Mesh settings to exclude contours.

Size Levels

Curly plant is build with 1-8 size levels of sprouts, where level 1 is the smallest and level 8 is the largest. Sprouts belonging to same level are not identical in size. They vary in certain range to achieve more organic look. Selection of size levels affects the homogenity of sprouts layout.

Overall Scale

Overall Scale works like a zoom tool for sprouts. This control allows 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 basis and core, which have their own scale control or their size is fixed. Indirectly, the overall scale increases or decreases also the empty space between the sprouts.

Ornaments and Monograms

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

Growth Kind

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

Symmetry

Grow kinds can be divided into 4 groups as illustarted in above diagram. 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 sprouts grow in just one sector (bottom-left, marked with red color in above picture) of the mesh object (circle, in this case) and they are copied around the Origin point to other sectors. The parent mesh object does not need to have circular shape. Shape of the bottom-left sector is used in all other sectors regardless of the real shape of those sectors.

To avoid excessive density, the inner sprouts may not meet in the Origin point. In such a case, the sprouts are connected on other proper nearest-point place.

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

Rotational symmetry combined with mirroring

Mirroring. In this example, a base vector object was used to plant sprouts from. Origin point is intentionally placed below the geometric center of the shape to make 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, the plants with rotational symmetry and/or mirroring take their shape from just one part of the parent mesh object. This part is called source sector and it is always a bottom-left sector of the object. The rest of the plant is rotated or mirrored copies of the source sector. This section illustrates how does it work.

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

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

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

Seed

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

In other words - hit seed arrow button to obtain different variant of the plant fill.

Base Tab

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

User can use up to 4 basis in a single curly plant mesh object. If no base is used, the sprouts grow from the Origin point. If one or more basis are used, the sprouts grow from these basis.

Basis form rings of different size and width around the Origin point. Each base has its own adjustable parameters: Kind (Sample) , Size and Width . Size and Width allow to tweak basis to achieve desired layout. Basis may intersect each other.

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

You can create ornament with just basis and no sprouts if you set the Maximum Sprouts Generations to zero.

Core Tab

Core is another kind of pre-digitized vector platform for growing sprouts from. Unlike base, the core can be assymetric and even user-defined (with use of holea and carvings of the parent mesh object). There are four types of the 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 which grow from them. Other core types do not allow mirroring regardless of their shape.

3. Core from Hole Contours

Core from hole contours has fixed size and cannot be scaled.

4. Core from Carving Contours

Core from carving contours has fixed size and cannot be scaled.

Please see detailed tutorial describing advanced techniques of how to use carving cores in curly plant mesh object .

Flowers Tab

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

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

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

Maximum mumber of flowers is roughly controlled with Amount parameter. However, exact number of flowers cannot be guaranteed as their placements is pseudo-random.

Multiple flowers can be used in a single object.

Leaves Tab

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