April 2014 Giveaway - Ten Free Textures and a Tutorial on how to Use Them

[gpholman]

Hello Gary, thanks for this tutorial - just finished and enjoyed it immensely. 2 questions:

In Stretching Wood point 2 you refer to the 'Pick tool' - what is this? I couldn't find it so used the Shape tool instead.

If you look at my attempt (attached) you'll see the bottom and right-hand sides don't meet cleanly (I'm guessing this is because I rotated the fill in the bottom). I can botch a fix by zooming in and ALT-nudging it up/right a pixel or 2 but is there a better way to get over this?

[Gare]

Hi Grant—

First...my bad. I meant the Selector tool and evidently I wrote Pick tool. The Pick tool is in CorelDRAW, and it performs the same thing as Xara's Selector tool. I use and document several programs and once in a while I fail to keep them straight.



You can use the Shape tool and the Selector tool to rearrange control points along a path, but the Selector tool has no control points to select unless you've got Show Objects edit handles (nodes, points, who cares?) enabled of the Infobar as my screen snag shows.

As far as the grain in the pictures being contiguous, that the front grain perfectly continues onto the bottom right, I never encouraged this or recommended it, did I?

It would take a wicked long time—if ever, because:

• The photo is slanted, and unless the front face, for example, slanted to exactly the same degree, it's no longer a seamless tiling image.

• I you actually sawed this cube out of piece of wood, there would be no grain continuity, because the front grain is traveling in one direction, and the cross-grain is moving in at least one mostly unique direc tion. So your piece is good as is, but if you want to mess with it further:

• Ctrl+Click on the side piece, let's say, to edit it outside of its confines within the group. Then with the SELECTOR tool , click+drag the convergence point in the center of the fill handles and move it around until the grain along the edge of the two faces looks right. Rule #23 in Art is: if it looks right, it IS right.

BTW, while you have that sinle piece selected, you can click the Show Rotation handles button, to the right of the Show Fill handles, and rotate the corner control points to try to even out the continuity of the edge a little more.

You work is very good, by the way!

My Best,

Gary

[gpholman]

Many thanks for the detailed reply Gary. I had a little fiddle with the grain direction as you showed and it looks more 'real' now.

One last question if I may - when repacing the bitmap fill with one of your other textures (using drag'n'drop), the replacement texture doesn't retain the attributes of what its replacing (i.e. repeating fill, brightness level etc. all reset to defaults). Anyway to do this and have the new texutire take on the attributes of what it's replacing?

All the best.

[Gare]

Hi Grant...

I just tried dragging and dropping a skewed image onto a shape that already contained a skewed image and it worked, even inversion 6.

I'm not sure what you did, and I'd never thought to try this, but it does work.




My Best,

Gary

[gpholman]

Sorry, I should have been clearer - it changed the bitmap and kept the shape ok but attributes like changes to brightness were lost/reset/defaulted.

[Gare]

I just tried something and it might be helpful to you, Grant. Let me do this in steps fashion, okay?

1. Import a bitmap. Make it a TIFF or PNG, or something that is mathematically organized into color channels. In other words, not a GIF.

2. Import a second, different photo.

3. Select one of the other and then choose the Photo tool, the camera icon.

4. Increase the brightness and the saturation until the thing looks unmistakeably edited.

5. Press Ctrl+C and then click the other photo with the Photo tool to select it.

6. Press Ctrl+Shift+A and I believe the second photo will take on the attributes of the first, at least as far as Photo tool options go. I cannot vouch for every Live Effect and other alteration.



Does this help?

My Best,

Gary

[gpholman]

Hi Gary,

Apologies for the dealyed reply - hectic week at work!

That worked a treat thanks. It would be nice if there was something like a keyboard modified you could use to tell Xara to 'keep attributes of existing fill'.

Cheers
Grant

[Gare]

Hey, Grant—

There is a setting, "Give new object most recent attributes" on the general tab of Options (Ctrl+Shift+O), but I realize that's not exactly what you're looking for. I'm just used to copying and then doing Ctrl+Shift+A on the target object.

If it's any consolation, Paste Attributes works on a heap of commands, from copying color settings, to formatted text, to extrude depth and angles, so very complex gradient fills.

Want more seamless tiling textures? I'm stuck for July's Giveaway of the Month!

My Best,

Gary