Mold Tool bug? Not acting as expected

[carlbe]

Hi, I'm a new user and was working through tutorial-

Made a drawing - 100's of objects - selected them all and put in Circle Mold (fish eye effect). All was well but one object acted surprisingly. A Line (4pt) with another line over it (1pt)and blended (5 part).
When put in mold tool circle, that object went to a black outline and lost all of the blend. Tried coverting it to shape etc. but no luck. Recreated it thinking the object was messed up - but did same thing.

Help!!

TIA
carlbe

[carlbe]

Hi, I'm a new user and was working through tutorial-

Made a drawing - 100's of objects - selected them all and put in Circle Mold (fish eye effect). All was well but one object acted surprisingly. A Line (4pt) with another line over it (1pt)and blended (5 part).
When put in mold tool circle, that object went to a black outline and lost all of the blend. Tried coverting it to shape etc. but no luck. Recreated it thinking the object was messed up - but did same thing.

Help!!

TIA
carlbe

[John Rayner]

Hello Carlbe,


Welcome to Talkgraphics. Which tut are you trying to do? Can not recreate the problem from your discription. tried to recreate the problem but it works fine for me... see pretty pic...

[carlbe]

Hi John -
on the Xara Zone CD there is a snowman (12dec97.pdf).
Quote from page:

We'll give our snowperson
some stick arms. Use the Pen
Tool to draw a Y-shape as
shown. (Actually two lines).
Change the line weight to 4
points, and the line color
brown (orange, darkened).
Make a duplicate, change the
line weight to 1 point and the
line color to pale brown. Apply
a 5-Step Blend. Make and flop a duplicate of the stick arm,
Skew it downward a bit and send it to the back.

did this, and all was well until I complete the snowman and select him for the mold tool. When I apply the circle mold the "arms" turn to outline in black - lose all colors, blend etc. I redid the act and held it out separate and did the mold just to the arms and same thing happened.

I think I must be making a mistake somewhere (?) - seems like this would have been found a long time ago...

carlbe

[Egg Bramhill]

Welcome Carlbe
I find the same as John. The blend remains correct in every way when a mould is applied.
Could you post your xar file here, before the mould is applied and we'' see if we can reproduce your fault.
Egg

[Su Lawrence]

Hi Carlbe and welcome.

Did your blended lines have pressure profiles applied to them, or have you been moulding pressure profiled lines before drawing your blended lines? As that can cause something like this to happen. It's a bug in the mould tool.

For example: Moulding a filled object with a pressure profiled outline, will delete the fill (or blend in the case of your lines) and leave you with just an outline. On converting the mould to editable shapes the resulting 'line' is actually a grouped shape or sometimes shapes.

I'm not sure if this is causing your problem but it sounds like a similar sort of thing. Even if your blended lines do not have any pressure profiles themselves, it can still happen; because after moulding any pressure profiled line, the mould tool will then treat any new objects in the same way as above, even if they have normal lines (Constant) or no lines at all.

To get out of this 'mouldbug' mode try saving, closing and reopening the file. Then see if your moulded blends have returned to normal. If so and even if they have no pressure profiles themselves, you can still have problems with them if you try to move them in the page (Xara X seems to remember and the blends may revert back to outlines).

If this is what is happening in your file, and on reopening the blends have reappeared inside the mould as normal, you could straight away convert the whole mould to editable shapes (Ctrl+Shift+S) to preserve your blends.

However, if you don't want to do this to the whole thing, you could: remove the mould, select your blended line objects and convert them to editable shapes (don't worry about ungrouping). In the arrange menu then select 'Convert Line to Shape', this creates a new shape for each line and you should now be able to mould everything as normal.

As a last resort if any of this doesn't work you may need to redraw your lines and re-blend etc after reopening your file.

Regards

Su

[gwpriester]

Welcome to the Xara X Conference Carlbe

You might try converting the blended lines to editable shapes (Arrange > Convert to Editable Shapes) and then apply the mould.

Gary

[carlbe]

Wow - first I'd like to thank you all for being very helpful and responsive. If you are typical of Xara users then I am so happy I tried this tool out. Thank You.

Secondly my problem - well indeed, if I save the file with the "error" and reopen it, the problem disappears, but the shape is quite odd. Su - I wouldn't know a "pressure profile" at all, still too new to the tool, but I did as you suggested - converted to editable and then line-to-shape and was able to apply the mould (sorry for spelling it MOLD!<g&gthttp://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/wink.gif and YES!! it is perfecto!

Intersetingly - the converted shape moulds quite differently (and accurately) than the one with the error when it is reopened. My snowman in the globe is saved!

Thanks so much for all your help. I'll try to stay out of trouble!

carlbe

[John Rayner]

" I'll try to stay out of trouble!" - Carlbe

Hello Carlbe,

One learns from their mistakes, so just think how may the masters here have made. Make a mistake, ask a question. Keep posting and sooner than you think, you will be helping others.