Making a bitmap logo spin in Xara3D Part 2

[simsmj]

Hi, Dal, I'm glad you liked the tutorials. The best way to kkep the blank space to a minimum is to set the frame size to the dimensions you want, and turn off Fit-to-width in the Font size field on the top bar. The max pt size you can set is 288pt, which may not be large enough to fill your frame properly, so if you then type CTRL-A, every object will be selected, and the Font size box will now show either a percentage, usually 100%, or a blank, which would mean you had set a specific size on one or some objects in your image already.

You can set this to a max of 400%, or whatever you need to make the image fit the frame. The downside to this is that it applies only to the X- and Y-dimensions, not the Z-dimension, so while objects become much larger, their thickness stays the same, as that is set by the Extrusion depth. The objects will appear thinner. So you will almost certainly need to increase the extrusions used in the objects in your image, and also adjust any textures.

If you have used sizing pixels, you can ensure that they are outside the frame and so they will be cropped off automatically when you export the image.

When exporting, set the option tin the Export dialogue to Current window size, and untick Crop, then export.

Mike

[DAL]

Thanks so much Mike. I'm going to try that and I'll post back after.

[DAL]

I had a go at playing with the settings you mentioned and here is what I came up with. Thanks a lot for the help.

[Meester Willy]

Thanks. Great help!
What next?

[yergun_002]

thancyous next

[kadre]

thanks to all for making them, going to be very handy

[Lanarkshire]

Ok, I've now purchased the product and came up with these.
(I'm still learning).

http://i35.tinypic.com/59vr5v.gif http://i33.tinypic.com/2uzqjj7.gif

How do I get text to revolve around the outside?
I saw in another post the Middlesborough badge where it had nearly everything spinning/turning, how is that done, any tuts?
When I tried to put a circle round the badge (first pic) the badge itself became larger and was outside the margin???

Thanks for the help.

[simsmj]

Xara3D constrains all shapes in the file to have the same height, and will resize objects to make them all conform. This is frequently unhelpful.

The cure is Sizing Pixels. I use them all the time. They let you combine multiple shapes in exact and specific relationships with each other, by giving every imported shape the same overall size, thus ensuring that Xara3D doesn't re-adjust them.

The basic idea is to put a single pixel-sized circle at the top left, and bottom right of the working area in your vector drawing program. All the shapes you make should be inside the rectangle defined by the two pixels. When you export any shape to Xara3D, you select the two pixels as well as the shape you want to export, and export all three in one step. They appear as a single object in Xara3D.

In Xara3D, you set the line spacing to 0, and every new object is imported on a new line, that is, after each object, you type a Carriage Return character. Because the line spacing is 0, and Centre Justification is on by default, all the shapes are superimposed on each other so that the sizing pixels of each shape all match up on top of each other, and anything between the pixels is still in exactly the place it was in your original vector program.

The only tricky part is deciding how far out from your working area the pixels need to be to ensure they can be easily cropped out of the finished image.

I think this would be a good topic for a sticky tutorial, and I'll put something up in the next few days.

Mike

[winssol]

nice thing thank you.

[mdhawthorne]

Wow! I am a new member and found exactly what I was looking for when I did my first scroll through this section. You have two soinning orbs with a different message on eash side. How do you get that effect? I can easliy get one message on one side of an orb but I did not know there was a way to further engance that. Thanks for any and all info.