Transparent Objects

[worleybird]

In the last few days I’ve done a couple of good things: Downloaded a trial version of Xara 3D6, and discovered this forum. I’ve learned things here that would have taken me forever to figure out. Back in 1997 I purchased Micrografx Simply 3D V2.0 which was bought out by Corel and now no longer being developed.

In Simply 3D it seemed I had more control over textures. Under surface properties: Texture Map, Material shininess and Highlight size; Under reflection properties: Image reflect and reflect color; Transparency: Transparency level and Edge transparency.

Go here to see pictures of the Texture Control Panels and a compiled example:

http://snsemp.com/trans/

As you can see the animated gif is 8bit and the FLC format is 24bit but doesn’t import into flash very well. However the objects are rendered transparent to any degree of transparency I need.

Is there anyway to do this in Xara 3D6 without having to involve other programs?

Thank You,
Worleybird

[handrawn]

Hi welcome to the forum

there are no texture editing facilities as such in xara3D - you import texture

'Textures can be scaled, rotated and coloured' to quote from the blurb - and that sums it up for X3D

so if you want to make your own you are going to need an editor - and also a vector editor if you want to make your own vector shapes to texture - most good vector editors will probably do both jobs ok

[James Allen]

This might have been a good post for the Dear Xara forum, Worleybird. I agree it would be better to have these features in X3D. At the moment if you use a transparent bitmap it is converted to opaque. They will no doubt add more features in future, and hopefully these will be among them.