brick pathway

[brynn]

Hi Friends,
I suppose I set up this board, for people to post any neat tips or tricks for accomplishing a certain goal with Inkscape.  But in this case, I'm asking for suggestions.

Attached is the beginning of what I hope will be a psychedelic poster.  One thought I've had, is to make the path with bricks.  But how to draw the bricks so that they are aligned tangent to the curves of the path, and getting smaller in the distance, will be a complex solution.

In the end, I may have to have the bricks in 1 big rectangle, with perspective applied, and then clip it with the pathway's path.  The bricks won't follow the path (tangent at every point), but it may be the only way.....certainly the easist way.

It would be really cool, if I were any good at sketching, to just draw them freehand....or some representation, at least.  I probably could do that with pen and paper, but with the mouse, I don't think I could.  Hhmmm....well, maybe....but it's likely to be a frustrating task.

At the moment, I'm thinking I could add nodes, and use them to at least make a visual estimate of tangent, at each node.  But they would have to be closer together in the distance, and further away at the bottom of the page.  It used to be really easy to do that with node sculpting.  But that's been broken in the 0.48x series.  I'm not sure if it's fixed in 0.91 or not, I'll have to check the release notes....  Hhmm, no, I don't see anything about that.  However, with 0.91, there's going to be tangential snapping, so that could definitely help!

Maybe there would be a way to use an LPE -- maybe Interpolate Sub-Paths, maybe Stitch Sub-Paths....??

Well, I'll be experimenting.  Comments welcome 

[Lazur]

Hi.

Can you draw the road with the brick texture, without the perspective distortion?
In a topview or similar.

[brynn]

That's definitely an option.

I've got something working, that I'm fairly satisfied with.  Although it will take some time, because I have to draw a new perspective path for each brick.  I tried the Interpolate Sub-Paths LPE, but it did not work.

What did work was the Interpolate extn.  The way I drew the path to begin with, already has a good perspective appearance.  So using that path (split in 2 pieces) I used 5 steps, and method 2.  Usually I don't see any difference between the 2 methods, but this time there was a big difference!  So if anyone is going to try this, you maybe find that #2 works better.

So I've got 5 columns of brick, in perspective, that follow the path into the distance.  And now I can use those lines to draw and shape the perspective paths for the bricks.  See attached wip.

[brynn]

Hhah!!  When I overlay the human forms on my brick path, it turns out they're more like paving stones than bricks!  Hhmmm....well actually the proportion is about right, for the farther away form on the right.  So maybe it's the human form on the left that needs to be bigger....  Hhmmm....

Still working....