Xara for texture art

Hey Xara, your product suited perfectly for us game artists for a while. Xara has always been a single soft on the market that allows to compose textures easily . Not paint like Mari, Photoshop, Zbrush etc . Most of a time you don't paint textures but rather compose from existing materials. Nobody paint things from the beginning for each new texture asset. Games creation would take centuries in such case and Xara has always been a breath of fresh air with its easy ability to compose bitmaps fragments quickly and then replace sources into normal. specular etc. maps Still much quicker and easier than Photoshop can do and simpler than expensive node based composing soft thanks to Xara name tags.


Few things we only need extra are:

1) ability to work with and export 16 bit per channel depth maps
2) ability to easily export selected portion of a document as image with alpha ( your png export works only for a selected object)
3) a few extra blending modes like : divide. lighter color and difference , or rather just Z blending ( blending two depth maps with a resulting mask for color layers)
4) Compositions or rather ability to hide every other named objects except currently selected name in the names list

For your 2), it all depends on your definition of "easily" that you are expecting.

I might select all the items of interest and then create a bitmap copy and use the Eraser tool.
Another way is select all the items, clone them, group then and then create the required outline in another shape and then combine shapes as a Slice.
Every approach requires some shape control so a masking or region operation does the same.

For 4), I create a new layer and ensure it is selected. Then I use the Names gallery to select all instances of a Name or colour or style and right-click on one of them in the Page & Layer Gallery and right-click and click Move to Current Layer.

Acorn

AOI, Area Of Interest would work well for saving selected parts and should not be too hard to implement.

Thanks Acorn for your suggestions, but would it be much easier if we could just use guide layer to put slices there and then export things with alpha automatically. It's what I do currently but it doesn't work for things with alpha. I just can't do it your way since I need to export several maps ( diffuse, normal , specular, depth) form the same selected rectangular area or at least it would be a lot of extra hand work.

The same for point 4. Would it be much easier if we could have just the same "eye" button next to names in name gallery. With your approach I have to mess my logical object/layer structure in the document each time I have to do a normal/diffuse/specular etc output breaking logical groups consisting of each of those bitmap elements. Would an "eye" in names gallery be a perfect solution like layer comps in Photoshop.

I hope that those two points at least should be easy things for Xara to do.