Jaggy bevels...

[eyemeansit]

Hiya!
I've been enjoying learning Xara Xtreme for Linux, on my Toshiba Satellite A65 laptop, running Mepis 6.0.

Lately, however, I have been having trouble with the bevel tool... I traced the outline of a font that I liked for a logo, but when I converted that tracing to an editable object, filled it, and attempted to apply a rounded bevel, it takes a LONG time to render, and the result is very jagged, whether it is an inside bevel or outside (see attached file).

Any ideas?

[kmalsom]

Hiya!
I've been enjoying learning Xara Xtreme for Linux, on my Toshiba Satellite A65 laptop, running Mepis 6.0.

Lately, however, I have been having trouble with the bevel tool... I traced the outline of a font that I liked for a logo, but when I converted that tracing to an editable object, filled it, and attempted to apply a rounded bevel, it takes a LONG time to render, and the result is very jagged, whether it is an inside bevel or outside (see attached file).

Any ideas?

Can you attach the xar file? It might make it easier to figure out what is happening.

Not that I will definatelly be able to solve it

[Soquili]

Hello Eyemeansit,

Welcome to Talkgraphics.

Which build are you using? I remember there being a problem with one of the builds, but the current recommended and the latest builds haven't shown any errors with bevels that have been reported.

[sunland]

Hi, somewhere along the line your letter objects probably acquired quite a few nodes. You could try selecting one object clicking the shape editor tool and seeing how many nodes there are. Drag and select all of the nodes with the shape editor and you can apply smoothing. Don't know if it will help there may be too many nodes.
adios

[Odat]

The thread that Bill mentioned is: http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthread.php?t=22405

The images there look similar to the sample that you provided, so that could possibly be the source of the problem.

Did you hand trace the shapes or did you use the bitmap tracer?

If you used the bitmap tracer, it's possible that the un-evenness of the trace put a lot of stray nodes in weird placed which might freak out the bevel tool. In that case, I would suggest trying to use the shape editor's smoothing function to clean the shape up a bit, as sunland suggested.

[eyemeansit]

Here is the build info:

Xara Xtreme
Version: 0.7 (1764)
Build date: 14-Nov-06 18:05
Built against: wxWidgets 2.6.3
Usage: xaralx [xar-file...]

The .xar file is attached to this reply.

I traced the letters manually, using the shape editor tool, using as few nodes as I felt I could get away with. I'll include a snapshot of the nodes, too.

[Odat]

I'm running r1762 here (currently at work), and I get the same result. Interestingly, the problem went away after I sized up the text a bit.

I think possibly the math involved in generating the bevel has rounding errors (as all comptuter math tends to), which, on such a small scale, makes the bevel look horrible.

I don't know if that's a bug or not, but apparently a good work around is to scale your work up a bit, and it should look much better. I never would have expected that!

[Soquili]

I'm running r1763 and this is what I see when I open your file.

[Odat]

Actually after some more playing around at home where I have r1764, I think I would classify this as a bug.

Your file opened up just fine in the windows versions of Xara (both regular and pro). I also discovered that the bevel "fixes" itself if you size the letter up by even as little as a single pixel. Sizing it back to it's initial size, the bevel remains intact.

There's clearly something funny going on there.

[eyemeansit]

Well, bug or not, I think I shall try resizing the text!... (quietly leaves and returns) Yup! This smoothed it out nicely. I don't even remember why I had it so small to begin with. Problem solved as far as I am concerned.

Thanks to all!