Tracing to create patterns

[molucca]

I was curious if I could make a side view by rotating the flat patterns. I added abalone shell bitmap fills, too.

[molucca]

In this image, I painted the areas black. I placed a continuous black border around the edge. Basically, tracing applications will make this into an object with a solid fill. You will also get the bitmap rectangle if it is a different color. So, anything that surrounds will be made into an object and layered underneath. The next object is the white object I colored because you would not be able to see it on the background. The black cells would have the same problem. The shell areas don't surround anything, and just become objects. In this case, I worked the image until I got a trace of the black object. If I had not, the white object would not exist. You cannot trace to produce voids, but you could draw into an area and simulate it. In Xara X, you could combine to get the effect. This was the same basic idea used to create the wing cells. Rich

[molucca]

The first was a manual trace in Autosketch with the fills defined there. The second was an auto trace with correction in AS. AS deletes all fills when the drawing is exploded. A little different technique than in Xara X is an island fill. I found the files needed to be saved in WMF to be opened in Xara X. The reverse was true, too. AS cannot handle all the attribute, however. All the objects were defined by point an fill. In Xara X, the AS files load with the object filled with a border, and the line drawing from which they were created. AS is unique in that the solid fills are editable in other applications. It is possible to use the hatch patterns as overlays and make objects by tracing.