Interweaving vines with 3D text

[Gare]

Dave—

This is PlayTime and ExperimentTime, so forget about any goal other than understanding stuff, okay?

Create different colored shapes, 5 will do, and overlap some of them with others.

Go to Window>control Bars, and then in the d'box, check the Arrange bar.

You can do all these functions when you select two or more overlapping shapes, this is from the Help file:

•Add shapes together.
•Or subtract the top shape from the other shapes.
•Or discard parts of other shapes not covered by the top shape.
•Or use the top shape to slice the other shapes

Yeah, you can go to Arrange>Combine shapes, but it's the tedious way to get things done.



It's what I used until he Shapebuilder and Erase were invented and actually I still use Add and subtract almost daily.



-g

[BeanPole]

dcahall,

put the vine to the back,
the next layer is the text,
then you klone the vine, which puts a second on top of the first one, and on top of the text.
then you draw the shape and cover the top layer where you want the vine to remain (over the text), and do the intersect shapes.

What this literally does is totally delete the klone except where you put the shape. Then this mini shape that is over the vine can be edited if necessary by moving and adjusting the nodes.

[BeanPole]

dcahall,

There is a great tutorial on interweaving thread in Graphics Chat section. There is a link to the tutorial named Interlocking Rings. I will try and include it here.

One of Gary Priester's XaraXone workbooks shows how to interweave rings.

http://www.xaraxone.com/webxealot/workbook10/page_5.htm

[Gare]

Ah.

I'd be remiss at this point to not point out that there are 15 years' worth of tutorials in Xara Xone's archive section.

Xara Xone 1996 through 2011 Archives

Gary Priester pumped the well for a decade and a half.

Gary Bouton is only on Year 2 ("Year II" makes it look classier, doesn't it?)

My Best,
Gary

[dcahall]

OK - I understand the process but am having some weird performance on my laptop. It all seems to stem from using the blend tool on the vine. With a simple line for the vine, placing the line (as an editable shape) here is the process and it works beautifully.

1. Put the vine behind the text
2. Select the text and the vine and hit Ctrl-C to save a copy
3. With both still selected Ctrl-3
4. With the "clipped" portions showing > Arrange - Break Shapes to make the clipped pieces editable
5. Ctrl-Shift-V to paste a copy of the original objects back on the screen
6. With the pasted objects back on the screen, Crtl-B to these objects to the back
7. Now go delete the "clipped" objects you do not want so that the vine appears to go before and behind in the desired areas

Again, this works fine unless I do the blend on the vine. Then my computer just hangs.

[angelize]

Just a point of fact with the Eraser tool: Vector shapes suffer permanent editing when you use this tool, but on bitmaps (photos, pixel-based paintings, and so on), you're only masking an area and if you open the Page an Layer Gallery, you can edit and delete the mask. also, as long as even a portion of a bitmap is on the page and the document is saved, the "original" bitmap is stored in the Bitmap Gallery and you can drag a copy onto the page at any time.

Attachment 94797

You can actually erase a vector object in a non destructive manner. Just set the softness setting to 1% it will still give you a sharp clean edge but what it does is change the way the eraser works and instead of actually changing the shape its self the tool applies an opacity mask.

[dcahall]

I have now tried this whole process with different (simpler) shapes and have boiled it down to the blend process. This causes everything to be treated differently. I got fairly close but had definitely proved to myself that the intersect shape down not work when there is a blended shape. If you can live with a fairly simple line/vine then the intersect method is very easy to use. Xara Xhris has a very straight forward video on You Tube (thanks for pointing me to that Gare) but it does not work with the blend.

[Gare]

@Frances. Thanks for pointing that out. I truly didn't know that you could "opacity mask" using the Eraser.
So now you can do both destructive and non-destructive erasing. both are valuable depending on your intention.

@Dave—I don't know what your system specs are, but I am able to intersect a line blend of five steps with an ellipse. I'm attaching the file; why don't you try it when you have time to let your system hang. The bottom shape is he product of intersecting the blend lines with the ellipse.

Try this: once you have your Blend group of shapes the way you want them, select 'em and then press Ctrl+Shift+S (Arrange>convert to editable Shapes). This—mathematically—simplifies the group and you might get where you want to go then. The dynamic blend attribute is destroyed and the blend can't be edited any more. but the result is a group of 7 lines if you do 5 steps, and I think I was able to apply a boolean operation even back in version 4 with a Pentium box!

My Best,

Gary

Oh, and P.S. We're getting O/T again and I'm going to get screamed at for "poaching" activity and privatizing it on the Xara Xone thread. Please share with the entire community when you have a tip, or when you have a general question, cool?

[angelize]

If you have the eraser tool you can easily use it on your blend and you don't have to even set a softness because this is the beauty of this tool if you erase a complex object like a blend or group you automatically get an opacity mask

Edit: Gary you are right we are straying here so I've started a thread in the Xara Graphic Chat forum for discussion and tips and tricks of both the eraser tool and the shapebuilder tool.

http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthre...ols-Handy-tips

[dcahall]

Do not want to get off target any more but here is the results of my research.



If you want to pursue this any further, please move to another thread.