Unusual uses for the Extrude tool :)

[handrawn]

the saw-tooth motif is one reminiscent of children's wooden toys and certain cartoon backgrounds as in Krazy Kat... I've been known to use it myself.. the composition is great.. makes me wonder what is about to come over the dune.. a sawtooth camel maybe

[Gare]

Now THAT has got to be more than a coincidence!

Three years ago I created about a dozen music CDs of original arrangements of Christmas Classics as gifts, and this was part of the jewel case cover:



I didn't use Xara for the final art, but I did create the profiles in Xara for extruding in a modeling program.

My Best,

G

[Gare]

Gameprinter's scroll—the use of a spiral gave me this idea:



Concentricity, and yeah, the ball is way too large to make this a fair puzzle.

BTW, I did a short video on working with the Extrude tool about two years before The Xara Group used their poor judgement to allow me to do "official" videos on The Xara Xone.



My Best,

Gary

[mwenz]

...I wish the Extrude tool could cast shadows!...

And be able to sense other objects and properly cast the shadow upon them. But I guess that's what true 3D applications are for.

One can use the shadow tool, of course. Just when it hit other surfaces, it doesn't properly project onto them.

[Gamerprinter]

Well I used the gears freebie giveaway from earlier this year to create a gear box for some device used in a dwarven mine complex map I did, using extrude. The gears were your contribution, Gare, I think...

[angelize]

by rotating copies is how I made 1 extruded coffee bean look like a whole handful of them. And I second your wish that the extrude tool could cast shadows!

[Gare]

@gameprinter—That's a magnificent piece of artwork, glad the gears Giveaway could be a small part of it.

All Xara work, or did you use other applications?

@Mike—yep on the limitations of the Shadow tool, but there are manual ways to create shadows: overlain shapes with partial opacity in Stained glass mode, and let's not forget Blends. One of my favorite techniques when adding a non-linear shadow to a scene is to make a large object 100% tran sparent a smaller one 97% transparent, and then use about 20 blend steps.

Actually, though, self-shading is what I was referring to.

Wouldn't it be nice in Xara if you could just draw the darned scroll, and then apply whatever, shadow-mapping as done in modeling rograms might be the key, and with little effort wind up with scrolls and banners that cast shadows on themselves, accurately?

See here? This is a drawing, and it was a PITA to accomplish and I had to actually model the darned thing to see where the shadows would fall.



-g

[Gamerprinter]

@gameprinter—That's a magnificent piece of artwork, glad the gears Giveaway could be a small part of it.

All Xara work, or did you use other applications?

All Xara work, nothing else.

Sometimes I do use multiple applications for a given project, including 3D applications, however for the bulk of my work, and that gear box example previously posted - all done in Xara only.

[handrawn]

Now THAT has got to be more than a coincidence!

sopworths [that's camels to you guys] ......





PS - any resemblance to sopwith camels is purely puncidental

[Gamerprinter]

All Xara extrusions, just as an experiment - here's my 'camel'.