Chess set in 4 views

Just have finished in Xara a chess set which is anyway my second go with the topic, finally was not able to decide about the best view to illustrate chess situations, so created 4 + (1) :-)

It is not a 'drawing' because all the objects by the Extrude tool (also the clock to be able to turn), so Xara drew everything, I have just set the angles :D

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Opening the .xar file is proposed rather in the 64bit version (at least on my computer), feel free to be inspired by the Extrude tool

.. and maybe the possibilities to have such views, a Scholar's mate in animation



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=D> =D> =D>

Really fantastic!

csehz that is super! =D>

Beautiful work !!!

Thanks for your kind words

whaw great work

Pretty impressive and you even included drop shadows!

:cool:

That is an excellent piece of work. :-bd

Thanks just again for your words.

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Originally Posted by Boy

Pretty impressive and you even included drop shadows!

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Yes however the shadows were considered as optional as was not sure how they increase the animation size. But staying around in half megabyte it still seems in balance even with the shadows.

Basically the layers (Table, Perspective, Shadows) were left in whole in the file because of these 'options', for example for illustration purposes sure better to have shadows and the farer objects smaller (the dark figures around 90% of the white ones being on the farer squares). But for animation maybe better to not apply this small resize (Xara often brings an error message that some scale changed on named object, however only the size changed), so going with those figures which are equal white and black on Table layers. Simplier to set and no need any calculation, just naming the figures.

Actually this example animation uses both shadows and perspective, if noone perceived that is good so being not so important but the white Queen is so 10 percent bigger than the black :D So her jumping into the dark lines officially would need a size decrease :)

Absolutely fantastic csehz, and you told me a short while ago you were going to have a break for football! Glad you didn't else we would not have seen this great piece of work :D

Stygg

Thanks Stygg, ajjaj you remember too well.. :D

Yes maybe Xara is not aware of such aspects that so XDPX9 is not only the program of the year, but still successfully competes with Fifa14 on Xbox :D Which is big word amongst soccer fans who exactly know that 53 days until the World Cup starts in Brazil! However that is finally two XaraXone semester months yet :)

+100, csehz.

Check, mate!


-g

Gare especially thanks for your words and never can be enough to thank for your tutorials and selfless sharing of inspirations.

Hopefully I will be able to learn just more during the XaraXone months and then express myself better through these and other ideas

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Originally Posted by csehz

Gare especially thanks for your words and never can be enough to thank for your tutorials and selfless sharing of inspirations.

Hopefully I will be able to learn just more during the XaraXone months and then express myself better through these and other ideas

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When you have a good idea, and share it with someone, and they go and make it better, their own work, and so on? Then I'd say my end of it is hardly selfless, csehz. Your progress and accomplishments, to know I'm a part of them is real "ego food", man! :)

As far as self-expression goes, you're doing quite well already. The most important thing it to want to express yourself. Then you choose your tools. Some people choose the theater, others an orchestra, still others choose Xara. Expressing yourself with emotion within a piece of Art is very satisfying and I'd like to see more of it here.

My Best,

Gary

I used to be a right snob when viewing work from the extrude tool, "That's not proper vector work", until over on another Xara site there was a posting on a marker pen which I did changed my mind. Anyway I found it hard to do properly, the animation here has blown me away, the amount of work there is large to say the least. For the ones that can remember user ratings who viewed this site a goodly number of years ago this is a big ***** (5 star) drawing. Thanks for showing.

It never ceases to amaze me how, when csehz has an idea or wants to explore a possibility, that he accomplishes it with Xara.

Forget I mentioned using the right tool for the right job for a moment. Csehz, you just make it happen and thanks for sharing!

TGIF here,

Gary

You are both very kind, yes as mentioned at the beginning it is questionable to be a traditional 'drawing' as the extrude tool did it for all objects. If that looks beautiful then first of all in Xara someones did a great job which renders such in a .xar file with 527 Kbyte, which so contains 10 pages and 4 from those are on three layers for the views and each with a chess table containing 32 figures plus the clock.

In my opinion there has to be a lot of opportunity in the Extrude tool + animation combo, because the extrudes have this small file size and that is usually key parameter at animations to keep it low.

The only disadvantage I can see with depending...not using...the Extrude tool in combination with animations is that it's good for GIFs, but not optimized for SWFs, because 1.)The Extrudes need to be written as a bitmap which makes each frame a little larger than pure vectors, and 2.) every frame needs to be a keyframe, the artist cannot take advantage of the 'tweening in the animation engine to make the files smaller still.

You see, csehz, yes, today, half a MB animation can reasonably be expected to play smoothly on a large percentage of all machines. But the smaller the animation, the faster the page will load, and the use of vectors is the assurance (most of the time) that your saved swf is as small as it possibly can be.

A secondary consideration is that once you've created an all-vector animation, you can scale the window to as large as you like, or as small. I have played around with some AVI exports in the past, and of course, you need no regard to saved file size, because AVI -->MPEG-4 --> or DVD for final playback, and its size is whatever it is.

If you'd like csehz, or anyone else, and there's absolutely no prodding or leaning on my part, attached is this vector drawing of a few chess pieces; I collected them from other drawings from the past, so I'm sorry they are not color-coordinated!

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Obviously, you're limited to one viewpoint in any possible animation because the pieces can only be rotated along one axis, as opposed to three axes as with an Extruded shape.

But what of it? Is there a simple transition, a cycle, you could make out of these pieces and some of your own, that would, say, come down to less than 50K?

My Best,

Gary

Gare thanks the tips and maybe which I wanted to say just is that the .xar file is amazing so small which contains the extrudes, the animation .swf coming out from that has to be unfortunately bigger because of the bitmaps.

Anyway seems no competition in size between vectors/bitmaps, actually had time to create a plain chess version below to initially check your very good estimate of less than 50Kbytes, well yes the same Scholar's mate game seems inside of 8 Kbytes! :)



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So definitely worth once try to create animation with 3D but from vector shapes

You gave me an idea, thank you, csehz, with the classic view of chess strategies shown in newspapers and stuff.

How about adding just a little perspective?



You just make the named pieces smaller as they travel toward the "background" of the board.

The file is attached here. It's as far as I can take it this weekend!

My Best,
Gary

Gare thanks for that perspective world so my figures also moved in for 138 Kbyte :-)



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You might be able to make it a little smaller, but right now we're talking about a quarter of 1MB, and your "story" is quite long—which adds file size.

You're doing great stuff, csehz!

-g

Love these one's csehz, with the animation.

Thanks sure could be smaller and yes did not plan that "story" from the chess match, it just came spontaneously :)