Bought the plugins on EyeCandy--Wood

[sallybode]

First time messing around with Wood and Bevel Boss

[RTW1]

Sally that’s a super job you may want to try this not a plug-in but still useful .
http://www.spiralgraphics.biz/ww_overview.htm

[sallybode]

Thanks for sharing, I used to have that before I had a computer crash. Now I save everything to my external drive that is useful.

Few tips on this. I brought in the file as a .png for the parquet floor. It comes in as a single tile. So I drew a rectangle and used the bitmap fill and filled it with the oak parquet. However it was not in perspective. Before converting with the perspective envelope, I made a bitmap copy. Because the parquet imported looked funny next to the dpi for the screen because it comes in sized for print, my object was for web. Also Xara kept crashing on me. So this way it didn't crash. I also put the chair on its own layer. Used the Xara wall shadow. Put a linear transparency on the floor.

[-=Drifter=-]

Wow!

[RTW1]

Sally, I have all the ideas but not your talent so they spend most of the time inside my head, while I try to workout a way of getting them on paper. Do you use Photoshop? I find it works so well with Xara I usually export to Photoshop as eps files and then do my plug-in work if any inside Photoshop where I have a lot more control.

[sallybode]

If I were to use the plugins in Photoshop, if I were to need to edit what I had done, I would need to start over.

The whole idea that makes live effects so cool is that you can EDIT them. The plugins work no differently than in Photoshop. These that I used are Alien Skin Eye Candy 4000. You can get the same plugin in Photoshop. The main difference here is the plugin for Xara is Xara specific. The more expensive plugin works in Photoshop. Another big difference is rendering time. Plugins do make Xara run slower but they make Photoshop run even slower for the same thing. With the number of effects in the drawing of the chair I would have spent a good couple of hours more in just waiting for it to render.

I much prefer being able to edit my work. Photoshop had a good idea when it made some of what you can do editable with bevels and then styles that you could apply. But that sort of editablity does not exist for plugins.

Except in Xara is does.

What this is is thinking outside the box. We are used to the way Photoshop "thinks" because it has been around a long time. Xara has too but is new to using plugins. You can use plugins in Illustrator, but you must change your vector to a bitmap first. Now the thing I have found with the way the effect looks with a plugin has a lot to do with dpi. The higher the dpi on the wood grain, the denser the grain. I wanted denser grain some places than others. I would have spent hours figuring out how to do that in Photoshop, I'd have nine or ten versions and then snapshots all over the place in my experiments to get it right. So we have these plugins, it is new to all of us, we have to figure out with the vector tools how they are going to work for us and what the plugins can do along side of Xara tools.

I see in my head what I am after, yes, but that doesn't always mean I have a direct path for accomplishing it. I have a lot of trial and error. This helps with the next drawing. And in order to learn I try to challenge myself to do what I don't really expect I can do. There are many drawings I start that just go nowhere. I am experimenting with technique. On the chair drawing I had trouble with Xara crashing when I did the floor because of I didn't know if it were better to build the floor out of tiles and then apply perspective to each one--too long. So I filled the floor area with a bitmap so that it would tile for me, then converted that to a bitmap inside of Xara and applied perspective and transparency.

I often surprise myself, not meaning to sound vain because it is hard for me to believe, though I know in my head that Xara is the best illustration program I have ever used--just how great Xara is. It just is a new delight every time I use it.