The Sketchucation.com site has a SketchUp forum with a long-running ”D’oh!” thread where posters write about program features that, when they encounter them, cause them to say to themselves, “Of course. That was obvious. Why didn’t I see it before?”
I just had one of those moments with Xara. I had thought opacity masks were just done with various vector shapes. I didn’t realize they could be done with imported bitmap images.
I had created two PNG images with a rendering extension in SketchUp. The first was a rendering of an architectural model. The second was an alpha mask that screened out the sky and anything else that wasn’t part of the model. Previously I have loaded the two into Paint Shop Pro and applied the second image as a layer mask to the first.
As I had XDP open, I thought I’d try to do something similar with it. I imported both of the images, selected and copied the mask image to the clipboard, selected the full rendering image, right-clicked on it, and picked “Paste as opacity map” from the context menu. The result was just like it had been in the image editing program (Paint Shop Pro).
In retrospect, I guess it is sort of obvious. Though the “Opacity Mask” information in Xara Help does focus on vector shapes created with the various tools and the black/white (saturation) levels of their fills, an image is just a rectangular shape with a fill. So “D’oh!”
Maybe everybody knows this, but maybe someone doesn’t.
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