How do you create a shape with a partial outline?

[Steve Monks]

Hi, I've been using Xara Photo and Graphic designer for about a week now to design some characters for a game I'm working on and in general find it great to use as a freehand authoring tool.

In order to develop a cartoon style, I'm building my characters out of free hand coloured objects with black outlines with cel shading made from partial masked clones of the objects. This works a treat until I come to put two of the objects together and want to erase part of the outline on the topmost object where it meets the underlying one.

I thought I'd found a solution with a tip on the Xara site (at the top of the page here) where you draw the outline portion you want and combine with a second object then break the objects again. This pretty much achieves what I want, I get a filled object with the outline broken where I originally left it, however, things start to go wrong when you attempt to mask clone a part of the object you've created (for example, to produce a shaded portion of the underlying object) as it's still a line and not a shape, so the mask clone gets confused and doesn't cut out the intended area.

I can't help feeling that this must be a pretty regular requirement, particularly for people creating flash animations, so I'm sure I must be missing something or going about the construction of the image in the wrong way.

If anyone can point me in the right direction I'd really appreciate it.

Regards,
Steve

[jamesd]

Try using Arrange>>Combine>> Add Shapes it will join them and remove the overlapping section of the outline.

[Burpee]

I'm probably doing it the long way but to get a partial outline I create my object and clone it. I remove the line from the original object. I hide the object body on the second object (no color in the color palette). Then I 'convert line to shape' and manipulate it to the shape/length I want. You can group both objects when you are done.

[Steve Monks]

Thanks for the suggestions.

I think the problem is that I want to retain specific parts of the overlapping line, so just adding the shapes together will just leave me with a single outline around the entire combined shape, cloning an outline shape could work but does sound a bit fiddly and could get misaligned from the underlying colour as individual points get tweaked.

The example below shows the sort of thing I'm trying to do;



Here, the head and arm are separate objects to the body so that they can be animated. I want to retain part of the head outline as it begins to overlap the body beneath the snout, the same goes for the back of arm where you can see the end of the line curving over the shoulder.

The solution I came up with was to create plain coloured mask shapes and stick these over the areas where I wanted a gap in the line, which is what I've done here. It's not very elegant but it sort of works, although you've got to be careful where they overlap other areas, particularly when animating the character.

I guess what would be ideal would be if there was some way to change the outline colour between a pair of vertices, but as far as I can tell there's no way to do that.

Cheers,
Steve

[handrawn]

if there is a 'standard' way to do this in xara [which is a moot point] then the way Burpee indicated is it

xara is an object oriented program and in that sense keeping your line-art [unclosed outlines, or closed outlines with no fill] and your colour-shapes [fills with no outlines] as separate objects makes sense from that point of view

once you have cloned you can group them - you can still select within a group to edit by ctrl+click

if you want to graduate colour on a line you can 'convert line to shape' on the arrange menu - but the graduation does not follow the path of the line, so its of limited use here

[pauland]

things start to go wrong when you attempt to mask clone a part of the object you've created (for example, to produce a shaded portion of the underlying object) as it's still a line and not a shape, so the mask clone gets confused and doesn't cut out the intended area.

You can convert lines to shapes, so they no longer behave as lines. You can easily make breaks in the outline then. Even with lines, you can break the outline and remove vertices to make a gap.

[Doh, I can see you've been told essentially the same thing]