Xara v4 3D extrude question

[RickX]

Hi, I am playing with the 3D tool in Xara 4, pretty impressive quality only I am missing some "finishing touch" options.

If you take a look at the image, what I want is only the white (gray) outlines of the white logo, but ofcourse in perspective, just to overlay the coloured 3D design. With other words I want to control the 'outline' color different then the shadow color.

Also when I have a gradient fill and want to change that I first have to turn of 3D, change the color/fill direction then put 3D on again, because I do this a lot of times to get the right colors, it can be really time consuming.

A nice option would be if the shadow can be transparant in depth, although that can be fixed by some tweaks..

When I change the extrude depth, I loose my 'same perspective' as the extruded version (which may be logical), also I can convert it to editable shapes but not break and ungroup it.

Anybody has some tricks to extract the outlines in the right perspective?

[edit:] Also the perspective setting has a max of 64, why is that? can't increase that manually..

[RickX]

It is not so completely different as you might think. The vector object in xara is actually a extruded polygon in z-depth, if you apply a bevel, it just adds some polygons. It uses the same approach as any other 3D software does.

The lights also already uses 3D space calculations with the target point the center of the object. So, yes ofcourse it will need some programming work but the leap may not be that big as you may think.

interesting - any chance of an example - in a new thread, it will get off topic here

Here is an example, first is the (vector) outline, then a normal extrude, then a bevel effect.
Xara does exacty the same, only with a front/no camera viewpoint.

[handrawn]

right with that thanks

all that training to see the 3D real world in 2D so I could draw it on paper

now I have trouble visualising 3D imagery from a 2D screen

lot depends on the xara code base I would guess and how it actually accomplishes this task

[RickX]

exactly.. lets hope the code base is not spaghetti after all those years

[jclements]

Rick, nice work!

You might want to play with the lights so they don't "recolor" the image but change the contrast of the existing object's color.

Try this, assign different values of Black (grey) to the lights.