Making quick rivets and smooth curving panel and rivet lines

[adlabs6]

Making quick rivets and smooth curving panel and rivet lines
See this tutorial as well. -adlabs6

By: adlabs6

There is an easy shortcut to making rivets and panel lines on skins, using the brush tool. To start with, we'll use a brush sized at one pixel and make some rivets. The most important control for this task is setting the "brush spacing" to get a pattern of dots at the interval you need. Higher numbers will separate the dots more, smaller number less down until they form a solid line. Here I've made a sample rivet line at 300 spacing, keeping the line horizontally straight by holding the "shift" key while I drag the mouse.



Next I'll illustrated an easy way to make smoothly curved rivets, and curved panel lines using only the brush tool. This is achieved by holding the "shift" key while making successive click points along the curve path. In the example image, I've started at the left hand side of the curve shape, and clicked once to start my sequence. Then I traced the shape I wanted, one click at a time, while holding down the "shift" key throughout the process. The line automatically traces between click points forming the curve. It's important to keep in mind that closer, more tightly spaced clicks will result in smoother curves. In the example image, each red dot shows where I clicked to form the curve. The upper curve has much better smoothness, while the lower curve is rather course and jagged. This method works the same for both rivet lines, and solid brushes making panel lines.



The click-shift-click method is also very usefull for making long straight lines on a diagonal. The panel line marks below were made with only eight click-shift-click steps. Five are horizontal (three of those are diagonals) and three verticals.