Roof Shingle Tutorial using Illustrator - Hand drawn line art style

I've been working on a way to automate the creation of roof shingles in a hand drawn style for my next papercraft project. I tried drawing the entire roof by hand, but the sizes of the shingles varied too much from area to area. After starting over multiple times I decided to try and procedurally generate the roof shingles if possible. Here are the results.

Attachment 43188

And this is how I did it.

http://youtu.be/932T8j-rLzg

Now the next step would be to create a script that would convert a line into a row of shingles, but that is beyond my capabilities I'm afraid. I looked into scripting, but couldn't find out how to "expand appearances" with a script and gave up. I also looked into recording an action to turn a line into a row of shingles, but the "expand appearances" and distortion effects didn't record.

It's too bad really. It would be so nice if either an action or a script could turn a line into a row of shingles. If anyone knows of a way to do this... Wow, that'd be amazing!

TheRooster

Thanks for sharing the tutorial, I use Illustrator all the time for making maps and have made some custom brushes, but didn't realize you could build in all the random rotations and distortions. I was hoping I could help... ends up I only learned some new things.

Thanks.
Repped.

Wow, I really like this. Thanks so much for sharing :)

Thanks for the kind words. I have been looking into it some more, and found a way to script this procedure using actions. It takes some effort, but it sure helps in the long run. I'll post more once I've figured it all out

Awesome! I would definitely be making use of that whenever you post the instructions :D
I think I prefer using adobe illustrator over photoshop for most of my work and its wonderful to find some tutorials for it!