Text looks like it is laying flat - How?

[alanwh]

Hi everybody

In the Xara Outsider August 2007 tutorial: Shiny Text, Jose Campoy did a great tutorial on creating shiny text. I followed the tutorial and did pretty well following along but, at the bottom of the page he has made the text (red), look like it is laying flat.

How did he do this?

The tutorial is here:
http://site.xara.com/news/august07/tutorial.asp

[jvila]

alanwh,
I'm attaching an alternative to get that.
I hope it is usefull for you.
Best regards

[alanwh]

Thanks jvila

I tried the mold tool but guess I need more pratice. I gave up after a few hours. I had the text twisted into all sorts of different shapes but never the right one.

Thanks for your help.

[jvila]

Mould tool is not enough, after using it you should use the selector tool as indicated to move separately the left side down and the right side up.
The 3 steps are shown in the drawing I sent.
If you need more detail no problem.

[Burpee]

I just gave this a try. Thank Javier, nice mini tutorial. May I add a comment?

After grabbing both top mould points and dragging them to the left, the point handles will need to be moved to square the envelope back to straight lines.

[timhines]

How did he do this?

Hi Alan,

He has a link to the file itself just above the image of the red text: "you can download this file and see it for yourself here"

Just click on the word "here".

If you look at it you'll find there are a lot of extra bits for the highlights/shading etc. You will need to ungroup the letters to pick them apart to see how they are built up.

Very nice image.

[alanwh]

I did see that file before I posted this. Jose put a lot of work into it and I agree it is a very nice image. Javier's mini-tutorial explained how to accomplish the "flat" look I was after.

I've just got to be more patient with learning how to use Xara Extreme.

Thanks for your input. I appriciate everyones help.

Alan

[Big Frank]

I thought I'd give this a try, but with XXP4, which makes getting this effect an absolute breeze. I could have spent much more time over it, but the point was to do it with as few shapes as possible in as quick a time as possible.

http://i598.photobucket.com/albums/t...araX_shiny.jpg

Just 4 objects if you include 2 for the background and the black frame .
Done in a couple of minutes because I already had the "Xara X" object. Allow a little more if you have to draw that from scratch.