Creating Text From A Custom Rope Brush
Inspired by Adobe Illustrator's amazing ability to create custom pattern brushes and apply them to the stroke or fill of any shape, I wanted to see how this could be combined with some of the most complex shapes there are: fonts.
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Starting with a base reference
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Creating the base components for a pattern brush
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Applying the brush to simple shapes, such as an ellipse
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The greater challenge arises when attempting to use a pattern brush like this on text -- which, depending on the font, can have an immensely complex geometry. Take the Auther font, for example:
Attempting to apply the rope brush directly to a text layer (after creating outlines from it) can often produce a path that's unevenly joined, and riddled with superfluous points.
Furthermore, even using Illustrators built-in Path Simplification tool won't be enough to fix this.
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A Better Solution
Tracing the text can give us a custom path that we have full control over, and will be vastly simpler after applying the rope brush.
Ultimately, creating the final shape involved a lot of intricate problem solving that really gets to the core of creating complex paths in Illustrator: simplifying; smoothing; using tools such as the Shape Builder Tool, Curvature Tool, and Anchor Point Tool; and to finish things off, creating custom shapes over top of the text to fill in the "caps" on various endpoints.
