Cropping images

[Riftvalley]

Hi,

I was recently asked to produce a small logo for a local company, they wanted a spinning globe that featured the SW of the UK.

I encountered a number of problems and wondered if there are shorter ways to acheive what I wanted.

Firstly I produced a vector map of the SW and put it on a small globe there were two issues here.

Firstly I could not get rid of a relatively large border around my image - the clients specifically wanted a 71 by 70 pixel image to fit their current website.

And secondly my globe was not circular, this second issue I solved by realising that in the extrusion options (apologises by mistake I originally said design options!!!) it says use size = 150, I found that using 158 gives a much better look (suspiciously like pi/2?).

The most important issue, for me, was how to remove the large border so that the logo would fit efficiently on the page. What I did was to open the file in Xara Extreme and then draw a 71X70pix rectangle and by trial and error keep adjusting my exported file until the main image just fitted my rectangle (actually a little bit of algebra solved this issue). I then had to frame-by-frame paste in place my rectangle and then arrange -> combine shapes -> intersect for every frame. I then re-exported from Xara.

This is all a bit tedious, is there a simpler way to crop exported animations from Xara3D?

Apologises for long winded question.

Also, for interest, I found that the flat vector image did not produce good results so I projected it onto a circle using the shape tool which distorted it prior to wrapping it around the sphere - which gave a much better 'look' to the image.

Martin