Sun Rays

[Albacore]

I was doing sun rays for an ad in a newsletter and I had a thought of doing it in a different way! I now have two methods of doing them in Xara and I wondered if anyone has a different appproach to make it even quicker to do.

1. Page Options under General tab make the constrain to 12 at the most. Draw a rectangal with the long edge running vertical. Shift+Ctrl+S to make the shape editable, press F4 to select the Shape Editor and Select both bottom nodes, use the down key to get length that you want the rays to be. Still with the Shape Editor select single Node and move them in or out to achieve the ray shape that you want. Remember how many times you hit the Left or Right keys as the shape must be symetrical. Hold down Shift+Ctrl+R to bring up Rulers, Drag a ruler from the left hand side and with the Magnetic Snap to an Object on drag a Guide out to the Centre of your rectangle. From the top ruler drag a Guide and place where you want the Origin to be but below your shape. Click and the object again and drag the Centre of Rotation down to where your Guides cross, you may have to click on Show Rotation Handles to be able to do the last operation. With your shape still connected drag your shape to the right with one of the top Rotation Handles while holding down the Ctrl key, when it shows itself in the new position ckick on the Righthand Mouse Key. Repeat again holding down both Ctrl+Lefthand Mouse Key untill you have completed all around, You can stop at the position at 6 o'clock, Ctrl+Alt+G (soft group) and then duplicate Ctrl+K and hit the Flip Horizontally key but that can give you a thicker shape in one area. The all you have to do then is to hit Ctrl+A then give the shape a colour of your choosing and then maybe a Circular Transparency

2. Go to the Line Gallery and select the Dash directory and Click on the 2nd (top right), This will give you a circle with a broken line right around the circumference of the circle,Draw a Circle (L) while holding down Ctrl with no fill and a Line thickness of 8pt, make sure you don't have a larger dash at the 12 o'clock position. Convert Line to Shape (Alt+B). Use Ctrl+K to clone the circle and with the Padlock selected to Lock Aspect Ratio in the top menu bar put in a value of somewhere between 10% to 20%, Hit Ctrl+A to select all and then select the Blend Tool, Drag with your mouse from large circle in to your small circle (I do it from the 9 o'clock position as I can see when the line is straight). Edit the number of steps in the Blend Edit tool bar in the Top Menu Bar from 5 to around 70.
Give your rays a colour and maybe a Circular Transparency.

I thought the second method was easy and quicker to do but as I said before there must be other ways to do this and I would like to see them.

[handrawn]

I'd do it your second way Peter..

[angelize]

I have a different way of doing this. I start by creating a circle then I use the free Spray utility found on the Xara Xone freeware page, to generate the rays, copy to the clipboard and paste into Xara. Spray's rays will be in the form of lines and they will paste in squashed, but that is easy to fix. place this group of lines on top of your circle, make sure it is aligned to the center of the circle, and with all the lines selected, select the freehand tool and change the profile shape as desired, and increase the line width, these lines will become the gaps between rays. Once you have your lines the desired width and shape, with them still selected Arrange> convert line to shape to turn them all into shapes. Will all the line shapes selected hit ctrl +1 to add them select both this new shape and your circle and ctrl +4 to slice discard the sliced out section and apply a circular transparency as needed.

[molucca]

You could male the ray transparent and copy it about a circle, and make a circular mask. then color a circle and use the mask to make it transparent.

Rich

[rpc9943]

Hmm this got me thinking.

1. Create a star quickshape with 20 sides, with the center as large as you wish
2. create a square BG shape, do some gradient fill
3. clone star, rotate a about the size of the "bars" you want to create
4. blend the two stars, step up to some high number
5. delete the star blend from the bg shape

the only "downside" to this is that the ends of the blended object will be "combed"... Hmmm

This is quicker than any of the above, I think?

[Big Frank]

draw one ray, create brush, rotate along a path, draw circle, apply brush, set line width, set spacing, voilà

[David O'Neil]

Another fun way is to use conical transparency. It allows you to change the ray color.

[Albacore]

Thank goodness that my work finished for another year!
To get back on to the thread again, --- Frances a few years ago I did use Dimetri's Spray Utility for a few things as well as this but I found it quite clunky and as time consuming as the rotate method. ------- Frank and Rich: I am not a huge fan of Xara brushes but I see how quick Franks method could be and it would be time consuming to change colour of the rays but it is a neat trick. David what a simple solution! would not have thought of that method in a million years. That's one idea I will use and keep in my mind. Sorry rpc I don't know your first name? I tried your suggestion and the idea is good and very quick but I found that I had to adjust the blend a few times to get the rays the way I wanted them and it was a bit tricky. Maybe it was me and the way I did it.

[Big Frank]

i'm very surprised (i shouldn't be) at the number of different ways we have found to achieve a similar result

once again, testament to the power of xara and the inventiveness of its champions

[handrawn]

is to use conical transparency

like it