In our previous instalment, we dipped our toes in and starting exploring the basic tools for drawing vector contours in EnRoute. Today, we will continue our exploration by learning to “mirror” and “weld” contours.
Drawing The Boar’s Crown
We will start drawing the crown with the rectangle tool. Place one corner at the bottom left of the crown and click a second time on the centre point of the crown. Then switch to the edit points tool and select the top left corner of your rectangle — move it over to the crown’s left-most point. Next, right click anywhere on the top of the rectangle. Choose “insert point” and create a new point. Do this two more times, then move the new points to finish drawing half of the crown.
Mirroring Contour shapes
After completing the half-crown select it with the select objects tool. Next, choose “mirror” from the “transform” drop-down menu.
A dialogue box will appear at the lower left of your screen. Make sure “mirror horizontal” and “copy” are toggled on. By default it will mirror from the bottom-left corner so be sure to mirror from the top-right, middle-right, or bottom-right (as you can see, I used the bottom-right).
Clicking apply creates a mirrored copy of the half-crown. All that remains is to weld these two half-crowns together into a single polyarc.
Welding Contour Shapes
Select both half-crowns with the select objects tool before activating the “weld joined” tool. This tool will merge any two closed polyarcs as long as they overlap (or share an edge).
As you can see, mirroring and welding polyarcs is a quick way to create almost any symmetrical shape. In fact, this is yet another method we could have used to create the shield we drew last time.
Next up, we will look at drawing polyarcs with “Bezier curves.”