quick mould question

I applied a stand envelope and would like to change the sides to a jaggy shape, but I can only produce soft / curvy shapes.

In FH I can add corner points to an envelope and then move the points. Is s.th. like that possible with Xara X?

I applied a stand envelope and would like to change the sides to a jaggy shape, but I can only produce soft / curvy shapes.

In FH I can add corner points to an envelope and then move the points. Is s.th. like that possible with Xara X?

Well, first of all, I hope, you could understand my question ... sorry for my awful English ...

I have no solution for the problem, but, maybe, an explanation:

The envelopes that come with Xara X all have 4 corner points. When you now change the envelope shape with the shape editor tool, you don't actually add points to the shape, you just change the bezier handles of one of the 4 already existing points.

This means, that I can't get a jaggy shape, because I can't add additional corner points.

Can anybody confirm my assumption or am I totally wrong about this?

Thank you!

Your English is fine :-) Better than my Hangol!

You are correct about Xara's Envelopes. However, there are two types of envelopes, curved sided and straight sided. The straight sided envelopes are also referred to as Perspective envelopes and produce straight sided distortions.

Unlike FreeHand and CorelDRAW, you cannot add extra control points.

This is not to say that you cannot do cool things with Xara's Mould Tool, have a look at Tony Robert's Moulds on the XaraXone Shareware Page.

Tony has also prepared a Guest Tutorial on mould creation that I will be posting in February.

Gary

Gary Priester

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XaraXone

I may have misunderstood the question, but you can do this:

Gary,

I'm really looking forward to getting the February tutorial and I hope, I'll be able to understand the basics at least. Please be so kind and include some newbee information as far as possible.

Ric,

thanks a lot for your work-around! I've been playing with your solution for an hour now. How do you come up with ideas like that?

Thanks a lot!!!

Xara is the most wonderful "try this" tool around. I knew that any "shape" can have nodes added, so I just made a mould and converted it to an "editable shape".

The only straight sided mould xara has is a four sided one! I.e. take the default envelope and convert all the curves to lines. Even that doesn't always give good results. Anything else you will need to cut up your original object into pieces. Maybe there is a better way to achieve what you want than a mould...
Tony

Draw a rectangle and convert to editable shape.
Select freehand brush tool, and shape your rectangle.(zig zag)
Apply mold (Default) and click on corner nodes(right up and right Down)and adjust the handles.

Note freehand brush tool takes a little getting used to when reshapping but is very helpful.

Thanks a lot for your help!