AV Bros. Puzzle Pro 2.0 Tutorial - Gallery Image A5 (Clew)

AV Bros. Puzzle Pro 2.0 Tutorial

A5 (Clew)

Although the AV Bros. Puzzle Pro 2.0 is mostly targeted to create the puzzle pieces rather than clews (ball of yarn), the power of the plug-in lets you easily create such effects. The "trick" is available thanks to the Draw Splitter feature of the plug-in (read the User Guide, pp.12 and 13 (#6) to learn more about this feature.)

Here is how you can make this design:

Open a new document, e.g. 600x600 pixels.
Set black as the foreground color and white as background color. (Although, the colors are not critical. It is just better if they are different.)
Create a new layer (in case in the future you want the Clue to have the transparent area around it.) Fill the layer with a color. (The plug-in does not work with the empty layer.)

Make the desired (for the future Clue) selection. We made the circle with the a diameter of about 460 pixels (It must be noticeably less than the canvas, otherwise some parts of the future Clue will be trimmed by the canvas.) and placed in the center of the canvas.
Save the selection as a channel. We named the channel - Clew. See Fig.1
Deselect. Then make sure that the new layer is active and start AV Bros. Puzzle Pro 2.0.

AV Bros. Puzzle Pro 2.0 Tutorial Image (Fig1)

AV Bros. Puzzle Pro 2.0 Tutorial Image (Fig2)

Make the Cutter window active and in the Shaper specify the shape of the knife as the straight line by deleting all anchor points from the orange line.
Specify the number of columns and rows to 60. The number is not very critical: you just need the columns and rows to be quite thick. It is clear that the thicker they are the thicker will be the clue and vice-versa. We have also set the thickness of the Splitter to zero. See Fig.2

Zoom-out until you can see the entire canvas (in our case, we zoomed-out to 1:2) and then go under Select menu and choose the Load Selection menu item. Then choose the channel Clew from the list (Just make sure that the "New selection" radio button is selected.) and click the Ok button. This will select all knives outside the circle (Fig.3).
Hide all selected knives by clicking the Hide button.

AV Bros. Puzzle Pro 2.0 Tutorial Image (Fig3)

AV Bros. Puzzle Pro 2.0 Tutorial Image (Fig4)

Now it's time to prepare the special knife: click on any place on the orange line in the Shaper. This will add an anchor point (see User Guide pp.34-37 concerning the topic "Shaper"). Now drag this anchor point, then place another one and drag it too, etc., until you get something as shown in Fig.4.

Tip: it is a good idea to zoom-out of the Shaper preview (we did it to the maximum 1:4).

In the Main window choose the command "Select All Shown" under the Select menu.
Specify the Randomize Knots level to the maximum (100) and click the Re-Clone button.
Click the Apply button. You will produce the "Clew" in your host application (Fig.5).

Note: in item 8 we mentioned that "...the thicker they are the thicker will be the clue and vice-versa...". Take a look at Fig.6, here we specified the number of the columns and rows to 45. Moreover we have added some mutations to the knives by specifying that the values of the S, H and U mutations be other than zero.

AV Bros. Puzzle Pro 2.0 Tutorial Image (Fig5)

AV Bros. Puzzle Pro 2.0 Tutorial Image (Fig6)