March 2012 Xara Vector Grunge Effects by iamtheblues Guest Tips and Trick Tutorial

[Soquili]

Larry unless things have changed over the past few years Xara uses it's own graphics routines and not those of any hardware. However my information may be badly outdated.

[wizard509]

Thanks Bill

[wizard509]

Here is what I was doing, it caused me so much aggravation that I gave it up before I got it to where I wanted it.

[Soquili]

Larry that looks like a very good start. Where were you wanting to take it?

[Gare]

Larry—

This might be of some help in reaching your goal, but not exactly the steps Bob offered this month.

1.) Figure out some way to create large, chunky noise. Then blur if if you need to.

2. ) Have Xara auto-trace it.

3. Clean the results up to your taste.

This is essentially what the tutorial is teaching, and Bob has Taylored his steps to make it a goal-oriented series of procedures.

My Best,

Gary

If anyone would like me to post some images of noise, say the word. Here's one to begin with:



—g

[stygg2003]

Thanks for the noise Gary, I've just got round to doing Bob's tut and I also saw G.P's method for grunge, not a lot of difference really and the effects in both are good, that's only my opinion Also I found that extruding these grunge effects DP7 was not happy and whitened out a few times so I left the extrudes out and settled for just the shadow.

Stygg

[Gare]

You did good, stygg—the "UberPoint" here is that you use a method provided by Bob or someone else, you modify it to suit your needs, you ultimately add a tool you crafted yourself to your personal toolbox.

Let it be said about grunging up something, that we are appealing to a lesser strength of Xara—dirtying up and distressing something really is the sport of a bitmap editor and not a vector drawing program, at least not aesthetically (all the time) and technically. You choose the right tools for an artistic effect, and the result of 1,000 autotraced pieces of grunge are harder to process than a bitmap of grunge, because the vector math is (unecessarily) complex to comfortably work with what is essentially random noise.

This is not me dissing the use of Xara, not to take away any of the praise I have for Gary P. and Bob sharing their techniques.

I'm saying that with your intelligent eyes wide open, you'll see that this technique is more uphill than painting some noise in a bitmap program.

Then again, you can't extrude bitmap noise...

My Best,

Gary

[iamtheblues]

Gare, I agree that vector noise is probably likely to be a job for a small minority and that bitmaps are generally the way to go. But having said that, occasionally a job comes along where the client insists on vector grunge for perfectly good reasons and that's where this tutorial fits the bill. "Nothing wrong with clean grunge", that's what I say.
Bob.

[stygg2003]

Thanks for that Gary, I put the G.P. Jpeg into Zoner Photo Studio, which is free by the way and has lots of useful tools in it and came up with this effect.

Stygg