I would like to know the answer to this, as well. I have been researching how to make rhinestone patterns with illustrator and have not found anything that works for me and all the rhinestone software works with Corel I'm seriously thinking about switching back to Corel....

 

To set your outline to work for rhinestones, set the stroke weight to the size or your chosen rhinestone. Generally add .2mm to the weight, so it they're 3mm SS10 gems, set the stroke weight to 3.2mm.

In the stroke options set the end caps to rounded and set the stroke as a dashed line, set the dash length as 0, the gap as whatever you want and with the round end caps option and you should end up with perfect 3.2mm circles spaced out by the gap options.

I'll jump on the computer shortly to take a snapshot of the settings to make my explanation make more sense.

That's how to do an outline, to do a fill isn't AS easy to do and takes a bit of guestimating but once you get the hang of it this tutorial generally works well.

Hope that helps.

 

Thanks Martin!! I thought you did a great job of explaining this and I love the step by step instructions.

 

You're welcome. I can't take credit for the step by step fill tutorial as I found that while searching for something else and when I re-read your question it sprung to mind so I hunted it out for you.

As I say, you'll have to do some guesswork to get the right mosaic count to correspond with the size gems and spacing you require but that's a start.

There's another way which can be done using the color halftone effect but again that's guesswork.

I forgot to mention, with the outline, once you've got your gems positioned you need to expand the appearance twice in order to convert the dashed line into recognisable dots that your cutter would use, if you need help on that let me know and I'll screenshot the relevant steps.