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Tip from John Clements
How can light reflecting off a tubular elbow be represented? The following process comes right out of an old Corel Magazine. This method was not practical to do until Xara X's ClipView function came along.
Note the following process could be used for straight tubes as well, but the method posted earlier is far quicker.
1. Draw the outlines of the main shapes.
2.a) Draw a curve along the "spine" of the elbow. Give it a round endcap.
2.b) Klone that curve. Give the backmost curve a large thickness (35 pt in this example) so that it will overlap the tube's outline and assign it a Named color. Give the frontmost curve a narrow thickness (1 pt) and assign it a very light tint of the same Named color.
2.c) Blend the rear line to the front line.
3. Select and move the elbow outline behind the blend (Ctrl+B), keep it selected and Shift+Select the blend, then apply a ClipView.
4. As in the earlier posting, apply a multi-color fill and a transparency to the "holes" and position them accordingly.
A big benefit of doing the blend using lines rather than closed curves is two fold: 1. Getting nodes to match between blended objects is not an issue and 2. If "Scale Line Widths" is turned on and the ClipView object is scaled, the rendering effect will not become distorted.
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