Box design

[fabian]

Although I've had xara extreme for quite a while now I haven't done anything as ambitious as a 3D box design. I don't even know if you can rotate a design to see all the sides.

I have a design that I want to send to China to have 1000 cartons printed with my logo and although the Chinese know how to do this stuff I wanted to make sure they print out exactly what I want and a good way of doing that is to produce a similar box with the logo already on the box so than they will see it and say "Sure, that's what we thought you said" instead of "Oh Shit"

Its no good spending cash and getting something completely different from what you sent them in the first place.

There's loads of software packages on the market but their either too expensive or they are so complicated you you need a collage degree to operate them.

So, any one have an idea how to design such a box that you can turn to see all six sides. Some guy did a video on YouTube of how to setup a box using Xara Extreme 5, but can any one tell me how to put the logo on the sides, then construct the box.

Thanks.

[mwenz]

Fabian--I don't think there is going to be an Xara solution. Being its a 2D software, there are no means to illustrate all sides of a 3D box.

But you can still put your 2D designs onto 2D surfaces of a box you discretely draw the surfaces. But you need to draw the surfaces as if you have rotated a physical object.

Mike

[Rik]

You can only see three sides of the box, at any one time in a 2D environment.
So, you could easily draw a rectangle of the size required and use the 3D tool to extrude a box shape that would serve as your base of the box design.

Then you can create an almost transparent rectangle with your logo on it (or whatever text is required for any side), and then use the 'Mould' tool to place it on the side(s) of your box.

But, how you're going to animate so that all six sides can be seen in Xara?
I haven't a clue.

[Albacore]

Will be easy to do in Xtreme but you would need to layout flat like a development of the box with all the tabs for gluing and folding. There are many sites around with free templates that you can download but most are for AI but you can get ones with .eps files which you can import into Xtreme. In this site Egg did a 3D box which was packaging for one of the releases of Xara, I think it was for Design Pro 3? which he kindly also posted the file for all users which you might do a search for here in TG. If you want more help please comeback and I am sure we will all give you a hand to develop but we aren't here to do it for you. You will also need to give more info of what goes in the packaging and the weight as this will have an effect on the material and the design.

[theinonen]

If you are not actually designing your own packaging and only the graphics that go on the box, then maybe those Chinese will provide you that template if you ask them nicely.

[wizard509]

Will be easy to do in Xtreme but you would need to layout flat like a development of the box with all the tabs for gluing and folding. There are many sites around with free templates that you can download but most are for AI but you can get ones with .eps files which you can import into Xtreme. In this site Egg did a 3D box which was packaging for one of the releases of Xara, I think it was for Design Pro 3? which he kindly also posted the file for all users which you might do a search for here in TG. If you want more help please comeback and I am sure we will all give you a hand to develop but we aren't here to do it for you. You will also need to give more info of what goes in the packaging and the weight as this will have an effect on the material and the design.

Something similar to what I was thinking. Seems to me that if you draw the box as as if it were unfolded and flat so you can see every side plus top and bottom and put all your graphics and text where you want them

[Acorn]

Send them a net of a cube with your six images/patterns on each face in the correct orientation.
Also include the cube as in one of mwenz's shapes but make all the faces partially transparent so you can see through to the back (make sure you reverse the back images.

Here's all possible nets of a cube: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/images/...beNets_950.gif

Acorn

[theinonen]

There are also some software that will create nets of objects and are intended for printing, cutting and folding models out of them like in the picture below.