Although our AV Bros. Puzzle Pro 3.x is mostly targeted to create a jig-saw puzzle effect, it can easily create an effect of a clew (a ball of yarn) thanks to the plug-in's powerful engine. The key-option for creating such an effect is the Draw Splitter option. (To learn more about this feature, read the How to Draw the Splitter? topic of the on-line User Guide.)

Here is the step by step instruction for creating the Clew Gallery sample:

1. Create a new RGB document with the dimensions, for example 800x800 pixels and set black as the foreground color and white as the background color. (The colors are not critical.)
2. Create a new layer* and fill it with the background (white) color.
   
   * It's better NOT to use the background layer or the layer with the protected transparency if you want the future Clew to have the transparent area around it.
3. Make the circular* selection with a diameter of about 600 pixels (It should be noticeably less than the canvas, to prevent trimming the Clew's "threads" by the canvas.) and place it somewhere in the center of the canvas.
   
   * We've used circular selection, because a Clew is usually a ball...
4. Save the selection as a channel. The channel's name is "Clew" (see Fig.1).
5. Deselect. Make sure that the New layer is active and then, start AV Bros. Puzzle Pro 3.x.

6. Make sure that the Cutter window is active and specify the Path as the straight line by deleting all anchor points located on the orange line in the Path palette. Then specify the number* of the columns and the rows equal to 60 and select the Razor Cut check box (see Fig.2).
   
   Tip! Since the small blue rectangles represent each knot in the Main window by default (for manual adjusting either knot's position), it's a good idea to hide all those rectangles by clicking on the Hide Extras button located in the Main window. (Otherwise the Main Preview area would be completely blue, because of the huge number of the knots.)
   
   * The number of the columns and the rows is not very critical: you just need the columns and rows to be quite thin. It is clear that the thinner they are the thicker will be the clue and vice-versa.

7. Go under the Select menu and choose the Load Selection menu item. Then, when the Document Channels window appears, choose the Clew channel from the list of the channels (Just make sure that the "New selection" radio button is selected.) and then, click the OK button. This will select all knives outside the circle. Now hide all selected knives by clicking the OFF button located in the Main window (see Fig.3).
8. Go under the Select menu and choose the command "Select All Shown".

9. Now it's time to choose the special Path* for the knives. The suitable Path can be found in the list of Paths in the Presets Manager. For that, click the Preset Manager button, located in the Path palette of the Cutter window and then, pick the "Threads (for Drawing)" Path. (If you have not already loaded all Sets of Paths that were supplied with the plug-in, then use the Load Set button and load the Mix set, which includes the "Threads (for Drawing)" Path.) Then click the Choose Path button. To clearly see the shape of the picked Path in the Path palette preview area, we recommend that you zoom-out to 1:2 by selecting the appropriate radio button located in the Path palette (see Fig.4).
   
   * Of course, you can prepare the desired Path by yourself. To learn more about this process, read the How to create a Path or edit its shape? topic of the User Guide.

10. If you now click the Apply button (this will employ the Draw Splitter option), then you'll obtain the Clew inside the host, but the Clew's appearance will be... way too regular (see Fig.5). Since we wanted our Clew would look pretty "uncombed", we've uses the plug-in's options for both the randomizing the knots' position and mutating the Path while cloning it to the knives. So, for knots' position randomization, use the Randomize Knots control located in the Main window to specify its value equal to 50. Then, click on the Clone button, located in the Cutter window and then, when the popup menu will appear, choose With Custom Mutation menu item. After that the small Custom Mutation Level window will appear. Specify all S-, U- and H-mutation levels to max (100%) and then, click the OK button (see Fig.6).
11. Click the Apply button to obtain the resulting Clew inside the host (see Fig.7).