Pattern Brush Weirdness

[Jason Burnett]

I create a lot of pattern brushes and I almost always have the same problems so I thought I would ask here to see if anyone "gets it".

This time I wanted to create a pattern brush that could be used for PCBs for strip lighting. I create the basic rectangular PCB and drag it to the brush pallet and select new Pattern Brush.

It looks good except of course for the corners and the end. On one side it has approximated a corner which is not too bad. The other corner doesn't offer an approximation and nothing on the ends.

So I create my custom corner piece and drag it to the first corner location in the brush pattern and when I look at the brush again, now the corners are huge compared to the rest of the thing.

I've gone back and forth about a dozen times tweaking the sizes to get them to make sense and nothing is working.

I've even tried dragging the brush to the page where I can see the individual cells so I can make the correct corners match the sizes they provide and it still is too big. 

I had this problem the other day modeling wires using the pattern brush. Any advice on the following:

A) how do I size the corners to fit and align with the rest of the brush?

B) how do I size the endcaps to fit and align

C) how do I keep the endcaps from distorting shape while allowing the line to approximate the path?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Mike_Gondek · Accepted solution]

Great question! Have you tried drawing all your shapes within a bounding box of fill and stroke none. For example, make the box 50px , and the art inside should be all be 50px in the appropriate orientations.

Has been a long time since I used a pattern brush, but seem to remember that was the issue and drag out Adobe swatches, and study them. The middle one is a horizontal section so they just made the art 48.24 wide with no bounding box none shape (no need to worry about vertical in that one)and seems it cetners automatically.

[Kurt Gold]

Can you perhaps share a sample Illustrator file with at least one pattern brush and some instructions that may explain the issues you are talking about?

Also, which version of Illustrator are you using?

[Jason Burnett]

Sorry about the delay, I had every intention of posting both the illustrator file and screenshots, but unfortunately, I got pulled away to another project. I will gladly post them when I return home. Sorry for the hassle, thanks for the patience.