March 2012 Xara Vector Grunge Effects by iamtheblues Guest Tips and Trick Tutorial

TalkGraphics' own Bob Taylor AKA imtheblues has contributed this months Xara Xone Tips and Tricks. His tutorial Building a Xara Vector Grunge Effect is a keeper.

You can use this thread to show off your very best grungy, Xara vector artwork that this tutorial has inspired and be sure to thank Bob for his fine work.=D>=D>=D>

A great tutorial Bob, well done. I found it inspiring!

Thanks, Bob!

Take care, Mike

Attachment 88056

Thanks Bob.

I like what Mike did, and tried to get some serious grunge going on with a logo. Turns out I had about 800 pieces and this dragged the Extrude to a crawl!

Attachment 88063

—g

I used a technique almost the same as this once to create an old west wanted poster, I used a bitmap transparency instead of the fractal plasma but other than that everything else I did pretty much the same. I did the poster as a prank gift for my husband I had him "wanted" for not doing household chores or some such silly thing :D

I used the same techniques with a few added steps to make a photo of him look as if it was part of the printed poster. I can't find my original file for that, but here is an example of some text grunged using a bit map transparency and Bob's basic technique.

Attachment 88072

Here is an extruded version I tried to simplify the grungy text before extruding by removing all but the odd shape that I used to distress the edges further and doing a little subtracting. I had it down to only 7 shapes but those 7 shapes had thousands and thousands of nodes and that still slowed Xara to a crawl!

But the effect is kind of cool!

Attachment 88074

Great tutorial, thanks Bob!

I'm playing more and more with profile curves.
Also with bitmap fills, using profiles for dark/light contone.

Marc

Attachment 88081

Some grunge...reduced in size.

Gare I like your grunge logo. That's pretty neat.

Thanks, Larry.

Hey, I arrived at an interesting, large, almost sponge-like piece of "grunge". It sort of looks like an old school composition book cover.

Here is is for anyone to play with, attached.

You can make a logo or something and clip it to this shape.

Attachment 88083

My Best,

Gary

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Gare

Attachment 88083

My Best,

Gary

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That gives your shape almost a cork, or Swiss cheese look. Cool!

I played with your composition book file and well... Grunge can be pretty! :D

Attachment 88089

great Attachment 88091 Bob.. thanks !

A bit late getting back to all the comments. Memory problems (PC not me!) and decorating the study preventing me getting access to the PC, plus a Super Saturday of rugby. Anyway, I'm pleased to see that you all enjoyed the tutorial. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Gare for giving the tutorial the extra zip that my original was lacking with his skillful editing.
I have attached a variation on the theme, where I used a bitmap fill of some grunge and vectorized that. The font I chose is Letterhead Fonts (LHF) Becker Rounded. Not free, I'm sorry to say, but I'm a big fan of their fonts (see here). What I like about this grunge method is that it is possible to make changes to different instances of the same letter to give the lettering more variety.
Bob.

Here's my method for creating grunge. It's pretty simple and involves a Fractal Plasma fill and a bit of fiddling with the Profile slider.

Create a bitmap copy and do a bitmap trace to create the vector part.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by iamtheblues

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Gare for giving the tutorial the extra zip that my original was lacking with his skillful editing.

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You're welcome, Bob, and I think we're all very happy that you provided us with a terrific method for dirtying up a typeface, logo, or just about anything that's too "clean".

And Letterhead Fonts is a terrific resource for truly fresh, ornamental, and just epicurean typefaces, that will set you back a second mortgage on your home.

I'd like to see some of the Fontsters on the new thread Fonts & Typography whip up something that can compare to LHF's offerings, at a significant tg member discount!

My Best,

Gary

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Gare

I'd like to see some of the Fonsters on the new thread Fonts & Typography whip up something that ca compare to LHF's offerings, at a significant tg member discount!

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And if somone does come up with sharable fonts, consider joining (or putting them up on) The League of Movable Type:
http://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/

Speaking of font-face, each one does include the font-face version.

Take care, Mike

By all means, the more the sharing, the better the type world!

But if someone is inspired by the content on TalkGraphics to do a knock-out piece of OpenTyperry or TrueTypography, I'd like first dibs to be posted >>>Here on TG's new Typography Area<<<

Fair enough, Mike?

My Best,

—Gary

Oh absolutely. I didn't mean to imply anything else.

T&G will receive my first (re)creation from my American Specimen Book Of Type Styles...

Mike

Now THAT sounds exciting, Mike!

Yay! Go for it, man! Did you get my PM about font editors?

-g-

I got your email <g>...

Yep, I have downloaded the trial of TypeTool. Playing around before dinner I took a copy of a Garamond-like font and made some small caps, moved some of the numbers around for old-style number and am still playing a bit to get use to the tool set.

Next I'll start scanning some pages, turn the scans into vector in Xara, do the export/import into TT and see how it goes. Once I have some progress, I'll begin a thread and maybe make a few posts on the progress.

Take care, Mike

Agreed, Mike, certainly the tool set in Type Tool is different than Xara. It's much like Illustrator, though, expecially the need for three different tools to define a control point (also called a knot, an anchor, and a node, depending on the software company).

First, you can import AI files to a character window in TT, so you can indeed use Xara to build your characters (albeit one by one); you just export one character per Xara page as an Illustrator (*.AI) file, and make sure all your paths are combined because fonts can only have one path, although several joined subpaths are indeed allowed.

Me, I prefer to design in Xara—the tools are simply quicker, and more than make up for the time spent exporting. Accuracy and detail I gain by using Xara.

However—Here's a slightly annotated cheat sheet of Type Tools 3's tool set. It's big brother FontLab has a few more tools, but not $300 more!

Attachment 88177


Remember to right-click when you use the pointer thing tool; TT is context sensitive and you got options with every tool. Be careful right-clicking directly over a control point, though. I think that's the shortcut gesture for deleting the underlying control point.

—g

I worked this one to death, and it still isn't very good.

Attachment 88426

Looks very interesting Larry.

I noticed this month's Xara Outsider mistakenly attributed Bob's guest tutorial to me.

I liked some of the effects I was getting with this one. Well Bill, Bob did a very nice tutorial, too bad I struggled with it so hard. I have followed the tutorial as best I can, over and over but always I seem to have problems. The last attempt has been the closest to success, but, I started trying something extra to it and ran into significant problems. I got it done, then used the 3Dtool on it and added a shadow and my poor computer would grind away trying to do what I asked but it took forever. Actually it didn't really want to do what I asked so even trying to add a shadow was a problem, change the trans. of the shadow was a problem, changing colors was a problem, so I am wondering if I need a better graphics card. Would Xara benefit from a dedicated graphics card? This is getting off topic, sorry about that.

Larry unless things have changed over the past few years Xara uses it's own graphics routines and not those of any hardware. However my information may be badly outdated.

Thanks Bill

Here is what I was doing, it caused me so much aggravation that I gave it up before I got it to where I wanted it.

Attachment 88430

Larry that looks like a very good start. Where were you wanting to take it?

Larry—

This might be of some help in reaching your goal, but not exactly the steps Bob offered this month.

1.) Figure out some way to create large, chunky noise. Then blur if if you need to.

2. ) Have Xara auto-trace it.

3. Clean the results up to your taste.

This is essentially what the tutorial is teaching, and Bob has Taylored his steps to make it a goal-oriented series of procedures.

My Best,

Gary

If anyone would like me to post some images of noise, say the word. Here's one to begin with:

Attachment 88463

—g

Thanks for the noise Gary, I've just got round to doing Bob's tut and I also saw G.P's method for grunge, not a lot of difference really and the effects in both are good, that's only my opinion :D Also I found that extruding these grunge effects DP7 was not happy and whitened out a few times so I left the extrudes out and settled for just the shadow.

Stygg

You did good, stygg—the "UberPoint" here is that you use a method provided by Bob or someone else, you modify it to suit your needs, you ultimately add a tool you crafted yourself to your personal toolbox.

Let it be said about grunging up something, that we are appealing to a lesser strength of Xara—dirtying up and distressing something really is the sport of a bitmap editor and not a vector drawing program, at least not aesthetically (all the time) and technically. You choose the right tools for an artistic effect, and the result of 1,000 autotraced pieces of grunge are harder to process than a bitmap of grunge, because the vector math is (unecessarily) complex to comfortably work with what is essentially random noise.

This is not me dissing the use of Xara, not to take away any of the praise I have for Gary P. and Bob sharing their techniques.

I'm saying that with your intelligent eyes wide open, you'll see that this technique is more uphill than painting some noise in a bitmap program.

Then again, you can't extrude bitmap noise...

My Best,

Gary

Gare, I agree that vector noise is probably likely to be a job for a small minority and that bitmaps are generally the way to go. But having said that, occasionally a job comes along where the client insists on vector grunge for perfectly good reasons and that's where this tutorial fits the bill. "Nothing wrong with clean grunge", that's what I say.
Bob.

Thanks for that Gary, I put the G.P. Jpeg into Zoner Photo Studio, which is free by the way and has lots of useful tools in it and came up with this effect.

Stygg

I'm going to go a little O/T here with a recommendation.

Xara can do a lot of bitmap editing, but it has no brush tool. ArtWeaver comes in a free and a commercial version, and even the freeware comes with effects and Painter-like "Nozzles" and natural media brushes. The results you get can go in and out of Xara quite well, and ArtWeaver is essentially Photoshop version 5 or so. The program can stand on its own and it's a little like what Xara is to vector graphics, ArtWeaver is to bitmaps, that is, the two programs can complement one another in skilled hands.

I've not used Zoner Studio, although I have their 3D blue lens/red lens program and it's very good at what it does.

@ Bob=if you read between my lines, you read correctly. There are a lot of times when nothing will do as a graphic except vectors.

My Best,

Gary