Xtreme & Illustrator mesh & twist tools

[atomota]

I may be way off base here, I have never done anything remotely like this, but sometimes that's a good thing.

Forget about using a mesh for the UI. Allow color points to be added, moved, and deleted arbitrarily, and use some kind of bezier surfaces or contour mapping algorithm or whatever to interpolate between them. Added points are initialized to the current color at that point and can then be tweaked. Add as many or as few points as necessary to get the effect you want.

[Albacore]

Just want to come back in here, there seems to be a wish for this tool by a with who answered here. Why don't you go and have a look on Illustrators World site and see how many of the users there use this tool from the drawings displayed there. I think there are only two or three of the major artists that demostrate that they use the mesh too. I have a few Serif programmes with this mesh tool included I would never think of using it as it is even harder to use than it is in AI and to use Kman's way of thinking about the Bump Tool in Xara well I would have thought instead of including the mesh tool and getting rid of the bump tool he would rather see "layered PDF's, a slection of really useable brushes and a programme that you don't have to jump through hoops to get to the printers.

A mesh tool may have some place rendering a face but as Risto has pointed out in another thread what a certain ohter artist from Russia can do with feathered trans. from a girl dancing with a top hat to a drawing called unshaven is tremendious. What also Jen is stating is that you can have all the tools that you want unless you have the talent to use these tools they are a waste of time. This is what I tried to get across with my copied drawing that that drawing took me a full 20 hours to get it the way I wanted it which is very unecconomic and if I had to charge a client and also make a profit my self that would be a weeks work of charge to the client. No self employed graphic designer could charge that amount of money unless he was sub contracted out to a very large design house.

With a few to many small transparencies used on a face we all can get the effects that we want without the use of a cumbersome mesh tool.

[RTK]

As on any board, some people tend to wander a bit in their thoughts and posts. The good thing is that you get an idea of how someone is thinking, and why they formed their opinion. The bad - well, sometimes it creates a bit of "confusion"...

As Albacore said, "This getting Silly now..." The thread is about a mesh tool in Xara X.

Just because it according to most people is not brilliantly implemented in Illustrator, it doesn't mean that someone clever can implement it in a better way in Xara X. It might not be on the top of the list if things to pour man-hours into, but Charles has recognized the fact that it's on "the wish" list, and that the feature has been on his mind on occasion.

So instead of world echonomics/politics - why not spend some time thinking about a better way of implementing it?

This thread is about a mesh tool.

[jamesmc]

Yep Risto and Albacore, right on target.

I was being verbose and way off topic. My apologies to the forum looking for ways to improve Xara graphic software or learn about Xara in general.

I'll be civil and on the point in the future!
(notices a large shoe rapidly approaching his buttocks.

[RTK]

I'll be civil and on the point in the future!
(notices a large shoe rapidly approaching his buttocks.

No shoe needed... In ALL, this thread is more of an intelligent exchange of ideas than you will see anywhere. There's no "fight" here - how could there possibly be one - when everyone is one THE SAME "TEAM"!?

Do voice your opinion - about "a" mesh tool...

[Grafixman]

A vector airbrush tool. Where you just click your cursor inside the shape and spray colors, with the mesh generated and updated from it. Now that would save you the trouble of moving those nodes around (unless you really want to). And a smudge and blur tool for further tweaking the mesh gradient. Maybe borrowing ideas from 3d programs for mesh creation (Zbrush ?) The mesh created would probably be very complex, though. Specially if you went really wild with the colors...

[Sheff]

Rather than a vector airbrush tool, how about allowing users to NOT use XPE and instead use Photoshop or Painter, or whatever bitmap editor they choose? I would much rather click on a bitmap in Xtreme and have it open in Photoshop to be edited than to accidently open XPE when I accidently double click on a bitmap.

A mesh tool might be nice, but it's not natural to use like painting in Photoshop or Painter.

You're all whining about bloat. XPE is bloat. It's not powerful enough to be practical, nor is it useful enough to be sold on it's own.

Most people here have a bitmap editor of some kind, so why not allow users to use what they have and what they prefer?

I'm not concerned about XPE saving on filesize by recording slight changes to one bitmap. I would much rather have the bitmap I need and not include the ones I don't need in the file.

[sgiff]

A vector airbrush tool. Where you just click your cursor inside the shape and spray colors, with the mesh generated and updated from it. Now that would save you the trouble of moving those nodes around (unless you really want to). And a smudge and blur tool for further tweaking the mesh gradient. Maybe borrowing ideas from 3d programs for mesh creation (Zbrush ?) The mesh created would probably be very complex, though. Specially if you went really wild with the colors...

The whole time I've been reading this silly flame thread I have been wanting to echo this idea and say why not have a tool that would allow you to paint inside a vector shape with an airbrush tool and it could be dynamically generated along a spline path like some video paint applications use. This would make a huge difference in trying to create complex blends and we already have similar code in Xara for example the drop shadow tool and outer glow tool both use something similar.

By the way Jens, it extremely hypocritical for you to talk about America the way you do and our jobs being lost to china when you have 15 percent unemployment in Europe and my God they just had riots in France because young people feel they are owed a job regardless of their work performance and can't be fired for any reason. We laugh at this over here in the US, not to mention your tax rates which are ridiculous over there and your 6 dollar a gallon gas prices. I can't believe you even brought this into the conversation. What a hypocrite you are. People should be able to talk about whatever features they would like without having a grumpy old man jump in and try to put down their ideas.

sorry, had to get that out.

s.g.