Noob - Achieve the coin affect

**Soquili** · 18 January 2009, 01:42 PM

Neil if you use a small circle you can achieve a convex shape by applying a large enough curved bevel.

I used Times New Roman font and the full stop character (period character in the US).

The bevel is set to 200. The Extrusion is set to 9.

**nadger** · 18 January 2009, 02:31 PM

Bill i cant thank you enough, not only have you helped me immensely, you 've done it without sarcasm, ridicule or treating me with contempt. Quite a rare quality when asking for help on a specialist forum.

heres what i've come up with following your advice... The onlt thing i couldnt work out how to remove is the "belly button" on the dissapearing side as the light starts to fade.

**Soquili** · 18 January 2009, 02:46 PM

Neil the belly button effect is one I have not found a complete cure for, yet.

You can play around with the extrusion size and the bevel size and sometimes reduce the effect.

Talkgraphics is a rarity on the internet. The members here are very willing to help anyone that is willing to learn. Your interest and efforts were an equal part of the interaction.

**nadger** · 18 January 2009, 06:09 PM

nice one, thanks once again Bill.

im having a blast with this, im up to 6 images now, im going to get passport type head shots of the girls in their kit and do a full team animation and turn it into a screensaver for them all.

**Egg Bramhill** · 21 January 2009, 09:06 PM

One Time Only posted here about an upward pointing star. This isn't really to do with two sided coins so I've cut these posts into it's own new thread. CLICK HERE

**513craig** · 29 January 2009, 08:34 PM

thanks, it worked - look here
moderated: 1.32mb inline hotlinked image removed

how can i make the coin face spin while the coin spins
kinda like this

Originally Posted by Soquili

mini tutorial.

**simsmj** · 30 January 2009, 06:35 AM

Aah, that takes me back. That was six years ago!

I'll have to hunt through my files, but essentially I think that what I did here was to create two x3d files, one for each side, but the side with the engine had eight pages, one for each frame of the engine cycling, while the other was the celtic knot coin. Both used the rotate animation set to the same parameters (esp front face only), except that the multi-page coin would change page after each completed rotation.

I then exported animated gifs from each X3d file, (there were eight times as many frames in the engine anim than the knot anim) then imported the gifs into XaraXtreme, and manually sorted through the frames discarding most of those in the engine set because I only needed one frame for each orientation, and actually had eight frames for each orientation. As the engine coin changed to the next orientation, I selected the frame with the next cycle position.

Lastly, I exported a single animated gif with all the retained frames from XaraXtreme. It sounds quite complicated, but it was actually straightforward.

If you want to pursue this in more detail, please start a fresh thread rather than add to this one.

Mike

**513craig** · 03 February 2009, 02:27 AM

so if i put an animated gif on one side. that gif will move on the face texture?

**simsmj** · 03 February 2009, 06:39 PM

No, Xara3D doesn't animate animated gifs applied to shapes, at least not directly.

If you have an animated gif, and can export each frame of it separately, you can apply frame 1 as a texture to a simple coin shape in page 1, then apply frame 2 to a second coin shape in page 2, and so on. If you step through each page with Xara3D's Step animation the texture will appear to animate.

However, I didn't use gif frames to texture the engine coin, I created 8 separate 3D coins, each in a separate page within the same X3D file. Each coin showed the engine in a different stage of the cycle. So rather than eight flat coins with their own gif textures, I had eight fully 3D coins, one for each cycle.

By running the file as a rotate animation, X3D rotates the shape in the first page, then steps to the second page and rotates the shape in that, and so on through all the pages and back to the first one again. I exported that as an animated gif.

I then merged the gif frames from both that animation and one representing the other side of the coin in XaraXtreme, and edited the sequence of frames, discarding a number of unneeded ones, to export a final animated gif.

I will try to put an illustrated version of this process together.

Mike

**nadger** · 03 February 2009, 09:08 PM

I will try to put an illustrated version of this process together.

after reading your post i can honestly say i am very relieved to read that last sentence

i look forward to seeing this excellent animation broken down in to "numpty stages" for us mere mortals!!