Best way to create an art brush for plumbing pipework

[David C Anderson]

I have created a plan of my central heating pipework that provides a good indication of how it looks in reality rather than being a simplified diagram. To do this, I first created art brushes for 15mm, 22mm, and 28mm pipes. Each of these brushes simply has a pair of lines defining each side of the pipe.

However, it would have been better to have had a fill colour for these brushes, but my attempts to add a fill that is limited to the line of the pipe have failed. Is there a way to do that?   

[Monika Gause]

You need to expand the gradient. There cnnot be gradients in brushes. You need to expand it so that there are only rectangles. But not too many. As few as possible.

[David C Anderson]

I was already expanding the rectangle with a gradient fill, as per Luke's instructions. I think the default gradient expansion setting was 255 objects. I reduced that to 20 objects but it still generated that error when I tried to use the modified rectangle to create a pattern brush

[Luke Jennings3]

Try starting with a very small rectangle, say .1" x .5". it's working fine here on a Mac, but I am using the latest version of Illustrator.

[David C Anderson]

My rectangles were also very small. I suspect that the behaviour of Illustrator CS6 in this area is a 'feature', subsequently corrected in later updates. Pity about that, but Met1 has already provided an alternative solution using a multi-stroked line, so my post has already achieved its objective 🙂