Stop & Post March 2007

[Egg Bramhill]

What happened to February?

Well here's another new month and time to post whatever your doing now .... regardless of the current progress, just drop it in here in it's unfinished state.

(didn't even know we where passed the middle of February, so you'll have to accept this highjacked image as this months banner)

[parahandy]

you've sure got that one taped Egg.

[handrawn]

a doodle-gif - working on some cartoon characterisations.....
added a quick rough too

[masque]

Old typewriter as illustration for poetry and short story magazine. A little way to go yet.

[Penny O\'Rorke]

Doodling with tiles. These are from a photo (top) of a panel in a bar in Italy. Fun to make and might come in useful.

[Soquili]

Not working on a project at the moment, but I accidentally found a repeating tile while answering a question in the Linux Xtreme forum.

A repeating diamond fill with the center fill handle moved off center of the square.

The image on the right is what happened when the fill was changed to alt-rainbow.

[Soquili]

Forgot to show the original square with the offset diamond fill.

[Ross Macintosh]

I've been using Xara Xtreme Pro in the development of sketchy line styles for use in the SketchUp 3d modeling program. SketchUp v6 has a new feature called 'Styles' that allows custom raster-based lines to be displayed in place of the usual vector edges. To make the style seen in my attachment I used Xara Xtreme Pro to create 30 different png images of lines. The 30 relates to five variations of each of six different lengths. When bundled as a 'style', SketchUp then automatically assesses the lengths of displayed edge vectors and replaces them with a random variation from the lengths that match best. Provided the complexity of the 3d model isn't too extreme, the program will apply the sketchy lines in real time as you orbit the model just as it does for shadows. When SketchUp applies the style it also has an adjustable way of automatically dropping out some lines -- it is similar to how Xara allows the smoothness of 'freehand' lines to be adjusted. (In SketchUp the feature doesn't adjust smoothness, just the amount of detail. The wobble you see in the linework is a feature of the 30 line variations I made).

I hope you'll see the effect has a reasonable amount of variation in order to display a natural stroked look. The quality of the effect largely depends on how well the lines themselves look -- I'm finding Xara XP a great tool for creating them and for me at least it beats scanning in real hand drawn lines (which is one approach) as Xara gives me lots of control over over my lines.

My goal with this particular style was to create one that provides the look of smooth pencil linework similar to what happens when you draw on plastic (mylar) drawing paper with a graphite pencil. I produced this style and others for commercial distribution via FormFonts.com

Regards, Ross

[remi]

I'm always fascinated from the style of your SketchUp/Xtreme images, Ross.

Remi

[Ross Macintosh]

Thanks Remi. That one is a direct export from SketchUp. The Xara connection is just in the creation of the line style that I can now use in SketchUp to apply to any model with the click of a button.