September 2014 Tips and Tricks - Creating illustrations With Only Extrudes

[Barbara B]

Creating illustrations With Only Extrudes



Xara’s Extrude tool is good for making cut-out shapes and swooping text, but did you know you can also build complex, photorealistic shapes? Like a toy train, or the pages in the billboard above, and even a long lens for an SLR camera. Rik Datta takes you through the precise steps to build a marvelously intricate long camera lens this month, and the techniques you’ll learn can take you to even greater creative heights. Or at least 250mm f1.4.

Check out Rik's technique and then show us your extrudes.......

[Gare]

Remember about three years ago, and I did a video using Video Home Producer version negative 3 from Tiger Direct...and I showed that if you rotate an extruded circle in a particular way, a column shape in 3D is the result?

Rik Datta took this to a whole new level: this tutorial, complete with specific Infobar values set in nice tables (which took the Admin about three hours to cobble and I owe her dinner for that!), shows you how to design an absolutely stunning long lens for a dSLR or SLR camera, like so:



It's always exciting around here for a contributing member to break with the predictability in presentation with the videos I do, and the result of Rik's instructions will floor you.

This is all done using only extrusions.

Get into this one: it's great stuff!

My Best,

Gary

[wizard509]

Great tutorial Rik. I can't wait to do it.

[csehz]

Rik thanks for sharing and for the tutorial,

I went without the cheat sheet trying to reproduce the shapes by the steps, however found rather hard as sometimes did not press enter or the clipboard contained the last copied color so at the end came out slightly differently



Was being not sure during the process what is the direction of the lights visually, just for those who would like to reproduce it a good tip can be to know that selecting all the shapes and switching on the lights, with grabbing one light all of them together can be moved to produce consequent lighting

[Rik]

That's a very good top, csehz.

I thought it was better to give all he figures for the angles and lighting. That way, you can produce the lens, with the correct lighting.
Then, you can experiment.

I like what you've done.
You've got two bright light sources.
Why not finish it off with the remaining parts of the lens?

[csehz]

I know that lens is not for that target , but maybe let's extrude a monitor beside with browsing to the XaraXone page and..



XaraXoneLens.xar