Celtic knots in Xara3d5

[simsmj]

I've been playing with X3d5 for a few days now, and came up with this. Getting the sizing of components in a composite object is a bit tricky, as X3d seems to ignore any sizing info in the imported shapes, and constrains each object to the same bounding box. I've used a trick of adding a couple of pixels to the smaller central knot at the top and bottom edge of the larger knot, to make its bounding box seem larger, but of course these pixels take on the attributes of the rest of the knot, and aren't exactly invisible. Has anyone any suggestions to get round this?

Michael J. Sims

[simsmj]

I've been playing with X3d5 for a few days now, and came up with this. Getting the sizing of components in a composite object is a bit tricky, as X3d seems to ignore any sizing info in the imported shapes, and constrains each object to the same bounding box. I've used a trick of adding a couple of pixels to the smaller central knot at the top and bottom edge of the larger knot, to make its bounding box seem larger, but of course these pixels take on the attributes of the rest of the knot, and aren't exactly invisible. Has anyone any suggestions to get round this?

Michael J. Sims

[Egg Bramhill]

The ideas fine, but try placing the 1x1 pixel dots top left and bottom right of both shapes. You can then import each image into Xara3D, change the baseline shift of the lower image to 100% to get it exactly centred. Export the image and import into XaraX and crop the pixel spacers out of the image.
Egg

[simsmj]

Thanks, Egg.
I was aware that was an option, so that the exported gif or whatever wouldn't have the pixels, but the .x3d file still would. I was hoping there might be cleaner way that avoided the need for these "scaling" pixels in the first place.

Michael J. Sims

[Egg Bramhill]

It can be done without the scaling pixels. You need to select the 2nd object say, then set the font size to 50% and adjust the base line shift. It's all trial & error but it works very nicely if you've only got 2 or 3 objects.
Egg