REVIEW • SEPTEMBER 13, 2000
CValley FILTERiT 3
[Page 3 of 7]

Craft, Roughen
& Broom Tools

The Craft, Roughen and Broom tools each reside within subpalettes in the main Illustrator tool palette and can be undocked for easier access.

Craft provides distortion effects that allow the user to stretch and bend meshes in four different ways. In some ways, the tool behaves in the same manner as the Smudge tool in Adobe Photoshop, with each successive pass of the mouse adding back and forth distortion. With the Craft tool, users can adjust both the area of effect radius and the resistance (to increase or decrease the craft's impact on the image).

Each of the Craft tools can be modified using the Shift, option and Shift-Option keys. Outline previews occur in real time as the mouse moves over the objects.

The Roughen tool takes all the paths in an object and ... well ... roughens them. A click of the mouse selects the areas to roughen, while a drag of the mouse determines the amount of roughness. The further the drag, the more roughness.

The Roughness palette provides a few options for altering the effect, including corner, smooth and area radius. (The Smooth option affects the entire path, rather than just the corners of the paths.)

Finally, the Broom tool offers four different effects very similar to the Craft tool. However, with the broom, the filter doesn't affect the entire object. Rather, it sweeps away pieces of the object and separates them, as in the image to the right, where the background of the butterfly remained in tact, while the wing coloration was scattered. (The example in the "Craft, Roughen & Broom" sidebar on the left is also a Broom.)

Metabrush Tool

The Metabrush tool is probably the most complex of all the tool palette effects. (Just look at the palette on the left!) Metabrush captures information from an object and, in effect, uses each element of the object as a stroke or portion of a stoke. On a single pass of our butterfly here, for example, I was able to pull each individual path out of the object and brush them into a pile of unordered objects (actually a spiral, but you can't see that here). When the stroke has expended all of the paths of an object, it starts over. Hence, the example on the right shows a single, very long stroke that used each element of the object four times before I let up on the mouse. The example on the left shows a Metabrush example that maintains the object and simply clones it, with the direction of the clone set by the movement of the mouse.

The Metabrush provides for three different tiling styles—one that follows the direction of the stroke, one that steps with the stroke and one that creates a ribbon effect. Within each one of these styles, the user can set the type of tiling and the tiling order (whether the original will appear on top or on the bottom, etc.).

Numerous other settings within the palette allow the user to alter the way the brush deals with objects, whether it pulls them apart entirely, whether it shears the elements, whether it adds color, etc. Users can also adjust randomness, spacing, angle and fade.