Yesterday, I worked on the next page of Rita. It includes a figure lying under a quilt. I decided that this was a perfect job for a distortion mesh; I grabbed some regular gridded details from an earlier page, turned them into a pattern fill, and started futzing about.

I started to notice some distinct quirks about how the mesh was behaving as I started to push it into overlapping itself. I did some crude patches to work around it, but I felt like I still had things to learn. So when I got up today, the first thing I did after showering was to open up a new document for the specific purpose of exploring how distortion meshes work.

Full preview.

Outline view.

THINGS I HAVE LEARNT:

– Illustrator does not guarantee that a self-overlapping mesh will be rendered the same way as it’s rotated. Look at the bottoms of the mirrored images. It seems to render the leftmost pixel of the undistorted imagery, and either completely drop, or merely hide, the rightmost. (I need to do a test with multiple vector shapes inside the mesh instead of the bitmap I used here – that’ll tell me exactly what’s happening here.) Presumably there is also some sort of painting order going on from top to bottom, as well.

– If you want to simulate drapery, you need to add more mesh lines, and push them around so that there’s no self-overlap where the drape goes behind itself.

– If you need to break a mesh point’s curve handles into a corner, you need to switch to the pen tool and break it with that.

– It is probably best to create a regular grid for purposes of draping stuff. Possibly both in terms of the mesh you create to do the distortion, and the imagery you’re distorting? I will have to explore this when I do my proposed exercise of drawing a figure with mesh-distorted patterns on all their clothes. Possibly as a standalone image, possibly as a costume change in Rita…

I wonder if it would be possible to automate the process of adding more mesh lines to hide self-overlap? I may have to see how much detail of a mesh is available to scripts. But later for that. I have a page to finish.

Oh man, I think I may be about to grit my teeth and give in to Adobe’s Creative Cloud. I went and looked and they have now quietly added some features I actually want. Curved corners, very much like what one of Astute Graphics’ plugins does, except better-integrated; the return of sliders for transparency (when they rebuilt the interface for CS6, or was it 5? they turned a bunch of sliders into dropdowns with 10%/20%/30%/etc), bitmaps in art brushes, and most importantly some new fillips to the pencil tool that lets you hold down a key to make some or all of your lines into straight ones.

The pencil tool is like 95% of my Illustrator use. This could be important.

Running the math.

Single app: $20/mo, $240/year.
Full Creative Suite: $50/mo. $600/year. OR if you’re an existing customer you can get the first year for $30/mo – $360/year.

My usage of the Creative Suite is basically Illustrator all day every day, plus InDesign and Premiere a few times a year for putting together books and Kickstarter videos and whatnot. Let’s say I need one of them like four months out of the year – if I subscribe to one app or another for a month or two and cancel it after, that’s $80/year.

So Illustrator plus ad-hoc usage of other apps is around $320. I could see it easily being $360, what with forgetting to cancel subscriptions, having book production run long, etc. That is about what I paid for a new release of Illustrator every year and a half. I’m still giving Adobe more money than I used to, but I’m also able to use the other apps without the immense hassle of abusing trial versions and/or the SAY YOHO route.

The existing user price works for me for a year. But unless I suddenly start making a LOT more money off my stuff, I’ll be going down to the single app plus ad-hoc rentals of other apps once that’s over.

Either way, I’m going to mull this over a few more days. I’m in the very last stages of getting Rita 2 to press, I really do not want to get lost down the rabbit hole of upgrading anything right now.

edit. Okay fuck it I sent off the very last tweaks to Rita 2, I did it. Now I get to have the JOY of migrating my settings. ALWAYS FUN. I just tried doing some by cloning over files, and now Illustrator CC is crashing on launch even after removing stuff I added to its settings. WHEE. So I get to wrangle installing it AGAIN. And it’s been stuck at 90% for like five minutes now…