Xara X Pro and Blender good match !

**danifou** · 30 April 2007, 03:14 PM

I was asked to to an animation for the opening ceremonies of the "14e Jeux Franco-Ontariens" (francophone games of Ontario, Canada) and since I've been playing with Blender's animation capabilities lately, I decided to use it to do the animation.

The logo of the games would have been to long to draw with curves in Blender.
I did the oultline of each color in Xara X Pro and exported the result in illustrator format. Imported the files with Blender (paths : .svg, .eps, .ai, .gimp) and got nice curves... Converted into mesh, a little clean up and voilà !

Now I've got my 3d objects to start the animation process (to follow).

Dan

**Turan** · 01 May 2007, 09:24 AM

Nice work - I look forward to seeing the animation.

for my c4d work I do all my line work in Xara.

Turan

**Grafixman** · 01 May 2007, 04:02 PM

Looking forward for the animation, too.

I use Corel Draw, but I export as svg, then clean up the path in Inkscape before resaving as plain svg. Then I use jms' latest svg2curve script. Inkscape does a good job of reducing the nodes and the latest svg importer script makes a clean import.

**danifou** · 02 May 2007, 12:59 AM

Thanks guys.
I've given the .blend file to two of my students (11th grade) who voluntered to produce the animation as part of one of the projects they have to submit for the end of the year (kind of a portfolio). They have been using Blender for a month now...
The following is a test using the spotlighs...

Everything has to be done for May 18th. I'll keep you posted.

Dan

**Mike Bailey** · 02 May 2007, 01:41 AM

The following is a test using the spotlighs...

Cool idea.

**GeoBen** · 04 May 2007, 05:52 PM

I have been playing with Blender for modeling rather than animation, but... the UI is soooooooo hard to deal with.

I am interested in your method of transferring vector images. DRAWING in Blender is not like drawing in Xara!

geo.

**handrawn** · 04 May 2007, 06:16 PM

I like blender Geo, 'course 3d modler I'm not, but I play.
I found the interface very difficult at first, but it grew on me - once it clicks its actually quite straight forward and comprehensive, if a tad unforgiving of user error [!].
Really had to wade through the tutorials and download a lot of the manual.

**gidgit** · 06 May 2007, 05:59 AM

I love the shapes... look forward to viewing more of this project

**danifou** · 08 May 2007, 02:37 PM

update on the animation : first 12 seconds : 45 Mb in AVI format...
Red curtains, spotlights moves around, the curtains opens and the spotlights merge on the Ontario Province (outline).

To be rendered :
A tree grows from the floor in front of the province outline. Participating cities (dots) with their names appears on the outline of the province and fly through the branches of the tree and out of the scene (that's the theme of the games... through the branches). Leaves grows at each passage of the cities and finally the francophone symbol (Fleur de Lys and the Trillium) with the faces appears with the welcoming to the games...

Since renderring the animation in AVI format is a long process with my computer, I decided to render3-4 seconds (about 100 frames)of film at one time. I then use Premiere Pro to assemble the clips.
Tried to upload a zip preview but the upload failed (~4.5Mb file)....

GeoBen, don't despair, Blender's UI is getting overhaul with the 2.50 version schedule for next October/November.

Dan

**danifou** · 31 May 2007, 07:44 PM

Movie is done, was shown, good reception...
Now If anyone can tell me how to compress 174 Mb to a acceptable size that can be uploaded without having to render to a smaller dimension, I would be happy to share it...

Dan