Newbie Xara Extreme User

[matelot]

Great work Enigma!! Really like the pix of the wine superimposed on the sunset - reminds me of other days.

jclements : With reference to the scope depiction - I have always been impressed with Xara's use of that, now I am wondering if there is any program(s) available that will enable an image to be rotated and viewed from any angle such as we see in Google Earth?

matelot

[Farmsteader]

If this guy's a noob, then I don't know which end of a pencil to hold and I believe you have to unwrap the crayon before you can use it! - Great work!

[EnigmaMachine]

Thanks. I do have that example file. As my wife would say "snake it woulda bit ya"!

Took the sample scope know apart and will reproduce each part for practice.

Thanks again.
Chuck

[EnigmaMachine]

Thanks Matelot. Yes there are programs that do 3 dimensional modelling in a CAD sense but they cost thousands of dollars. There may be simpler less expensive ones though. I've seen some of those packages in use in the Aerospace industry such as at Boeing. I took a 40 hour course in Catia many years ago and it had a 3 axis rotatable rendering engine.\

[jamesmc]

Xara offers their own version of a 3D program. It was designed for text presentations,however other things can be done if you venture over to the Xara3D Segment in this forum.

I hastily put this together just to illustrate your point about the knob. I didn't do a good job on the lines of the knob, but I think you get a good idea of what you can make.

It's just a simple copy and paste, then adjusting the lights for material color. No textures were added.

With more care, one can make very realistic metal pieces using Xara and Xara3D

[jclements]

Enigma,

Another alternative is to draw orthographic views and then apply skew, scale, and rotation values. This principle will work in any vector drawing program which has a means to alter those properties.

A table using of these properties which produces isometric representations can be found here:
http://www.xaraxone.com/guest/guest05/html/3.htm

You could also draw orthographically then apply Xara's perspective mold. I have never been able to get satisfactory resist using this method, however.

*****

If you want to rotate your views (like Catia and other 3D programs), then you may want to try out the free Google SketchUp 6. It does have a limited PDF vector export filter by which you could import that artwork into XaraPro for coloring and shape editing.

[EnigmaMachine]

Thanks for all the great feedback. I ended up cutting and pasting the knobs from the Xara Microscope example into my drawing. First I tore them apart to see how they were made. Learned about how to blend the Knurls so that they are more dense at the outside edge of the know and less dense at the middle closest to the viewer. Excellent stuff.
Now working on a NYC 4-6-4 Steam Locomotive. It's going to be my flagship effort....!