Plug-ins and Displacements

[angelize]

I've been trying to remember the name of this plugin, I remember trying it a year or so ago. I unloaded some plugins and stuff from my older machine and lost the name of this one. To be honest I haven't looked very hard because I couldn't remember how well it worked. You can very easily create your own displacement maps in Xara and if you have DPX the shapebuilder is a handy tool for this!

Here is a quickie done with the displacement filter and a displacement map I created in DPX

[Gare]

It looks pretty darned good, Frances, pardon my French. :)

I'd like to shelve this discussion until I run a tutorial on it next month.

But to validate what Germaine was asking for, I did this with the filter, and then auto-traced it. The attached file is all vector. Imagine what you can do to "distress" the edges of a piece of parchment or something.



-g

[germaine]

did it with a photo not perfect but it is a beginning
thank you

[Gare]

If your image in post #133 is close to what you wish to accomplish with the filter, then it is all good!

Nice, and nice use of burnt orange color.

My Best,

Gary

[Big Frank]

I downloaded and installed displace map from image skill

fantastic tip - many thanks

sadly, there is no way to apply this Live Effect plug-in to vector shapes so the changes are permanently vector

so the changes are permanently raster (bitmap)

[Gare]

Yep, you can only output a filtered shape as a bitmap, but then again I think this is true of all the filters.

Not a biggie if your displacement is simple, though: you auto-trace it.

Also, regardless of how messed-up you displace a vector shape, like most Live Effects, you can edit the position and type of control points along the path, which can make for some interesting art.

My Best,

Gary

[germaine]

Hi Garry my problem with image skil seems also to be solved maybe it was caused by using too much memory sometimes I download or listen to language lessons and working in programs ?
here I used yours and afterward I used imageskill displacement map
Rich solved my problem exporting png I asked in another forum
If I post in the wrong forum you can delete or remove my posts

[Seagull]

Well, I know this thread is way off topic now and Gar-eye is trying to get it back, but while it's here, I'll add my two bits worth. You can buy two sets of Alien Skin plug-ins from Xara, and both sets have a large selection in them. Now, in the Xenofex2 set, there is one distortion filter that does the waving flag, under the name, surprise, surprise of flag. And if this peaks an interest for possible buyers, you can also do chrome, (copper, gold), glass, lightning, etc, etc, etc., and the plug-ins are very reasonable priced. Remember folks, only from Xara.

And while off topic, I will continue. A few years ago on this forum, if the brain remembers correctly, there was a thread about installing your own image maps. They had to be a certain size (quite small I believe), saved as TIFF, and saved to the correct folder for the right plug-in. Mind you, this memory is very, very foggy, so I may be totally mistaking what I'm talking about, it might even not have been about the alien skin plug-ins, but I think it was. Anyway, for those that have the plug-in and want to experiment with it, you have about 6 or 8 pre-set setting from the menu bar upstairs (hanging from the left, top, right, windy, etc) and three slider adjustments for shrink (?), wind, and brightness.

For those of you that have these plug-ins, great. For those of you who don't, take off your shoes, remove your sock, and dig out a few of those old moldy dollars you've been saving there and give yourself a small present.

And now back to Gar-eye. If the man can convince the Xara team to include this, this could be good, It would be great to be able to wrap a texture around an image of something 3d-ish, like putting your face on somebody elses body, but how they would every accomplish this in a 2d program, I don't think they could. Basically, I think they could only come up with some sort of distortion filter similar to alien skin, which already exists, in which case, why create bloatware.

Looking forward to next month when you cover this particular subject, if you are still planning to do so

[jvila]

Segull,
I completely agree with you, and talking about distortion, xara mould tool should be able to mould bitmaps, that would be fantastic..
Best regards

[Gare]

@ frank—

I believe the name "gare-eye" has already been take by the Other Gary, Gary Priester. His avatar has been an iris for the best part of this year. I'm the Other, Other Gary, just for clarification.

Yes, we're getting far too far into Off-topicLand, and I confess that I encouraged Germaine's original post instead of discouraging it on this thread. It was concerning Art, I'm all about supporting Art, if anyone wants their money back, write to me.

Frank, although it's illuminating to our community that Alien Skin has a Flag filter, why would you suggest that people reach down deep into their pockets when ImageSkill provides a perfectly working version for Xara for free? I don't even see Xenofex 2 for sale on Alien Skin or on the web period. The only links are to Eye Candy, and that's $249 retail.

Please wait until next month when I show how to use this free filter to create flags and other materials, deal?

There is, or was, a true 3D filter created by Andromeda Software a long time ago called...3D. And what it do was map a bitmap image around a cube, sphere, or cylinder, which are the primitives most used to map 2D images to 3D space. It's quite nice, I can't get it to run in Photoshop at the moment, so I suspect it doesn't like the 64x space of Windows 7. I'm talking mid-1990s when the filter was first released.

To make a long story short, the filter would not run correctly inside Xara, which means it depending on something in the program environment that doesn't exist in Xara.

I'm very torn, intellectually and professionally, about putting so many bitmap features in Xara. There are several vector tools Xara doesn't have after 15 years: a B-spline drawing tool...The Editor tool is close but not as full featured as the one in CorelDRAW. The Shape Builder is in its infancy when compared to Illustrator's Paintbrush tool and Blob Brush tool, which can produce true calligraphic strokes, which CorelDRAW has also been able to do for several versions. And Illustrator has a Width tool, so you can adjust the width of a path you draw at each and every control point on the path. You can't add or delete or work with control points on a QuickShape shape as you would with a regular path segment, but CorelDRAW has had a dynamic Polygon tool since version 6.

I understand that The Xara Group has only so much time, so many programmers, and so many requests from MAGIX for future updates. Given that, how about this idea? If you want to edit bitmaps with no constrins other than the limitations of the program itself, buy Photoshop Elements at newegg.com for $65, about the price of an Adobe Standard plug-in. Then let the engineers at Xara put features in Designer Pro v11 that complement what the program does best: vector drawing. Xara has always been "the vector program that thinks it's a bitmap program", but clearly—by the requests I've seen—that happy balance between vector and bitmaps features is being pushed in a direction that makes the product less focused overall. Instead of urging the developers to make Xara do something it was never intended to do, why not just go out and buy a solution?

@Javier—

From a programming point of view (and I'm not a programmer) giving us a mesh warp tool like Photoshop's Warp mode of the Free Transform function, would require Xara to build a bitmap image in memory from whatever's on screen, which I'm sure is do-able because Xara has other pixel-adjustment features, but the time and resources it would take to satisfy a small percent of users probably won't be a good argument to hold with The Xara Group.

Why not auto-trace your bitmap image and then use the Mould tool's Envelope mode like this?



Now, I admit that the Mould tool needs work: being limited to four control points is not current technology, not when CorelDRAW has offered a user-customizable Envelope tool—so you can mould a fish drawing into an apple shape, for example, with any number of control points—since 1994.

I'm sorry that this has become more of a book than a post (!), but you've all asked very good questions, forums are good places to discuss questions, and I encourage members to use a resource here that The Xara Group has been kind enough to set up for us free of charge.

To put a happy ending on my book-that-should-be-a-post, why don't you take your requests to the "Dear Xara" area?

Requests don't get a lot of attention on the Xara Xone forum area—the area is just too new!

Skip work today, the weather is too nice outside.

—Gary