tricky transparency

[Ross Macintosh]

The ax looks great Remi. Perhaps shadows for the strings would be a nice touch.

Regards, Ross

PS: That inner glow technique is cool. I think I'll find it easier to remember.

[remi]

Thanks Ross. It was just a short test on my side, because I was interested to reproduce the black glow.

Honor to whom honor is due: The original drawing comes from Christian Lamminger-Fiedler, a german Inkscape user.

Regards,
Remi

[Xhris]

Thank you for your tips, Bob and Xhris.

I've used the feather/clipview technique for a short study. By changing the feather profile it's possible to do some fine-tuning.

The feather technique isn't as flexible as the glow shadow technique. But there are two issues with Xara and glow shadows: since Xtreme when they re-jigged the internal shadow code, making a glow shadow large causes horrendous slow-down, and thus it's not very useable in this case because you can't get the inner dark region very far in. X1 was great for blur shadows - you could make it as large as you wanted and it didn't slow down. Secondly, there is a 40 pix max blur size - which in this case prevents you from having the blur very large.

The glow shadow issue is a bug that they are aware of because I reported it when Xtreme was released. Xara claim that the reason for the 50 pix feather limit (and presumably the 40 pix glow shadow blur limit) is due to performance reasons. I personally don't buy this; if you zoom in, you essentially overcome the limit and cause Xara to process considerably larger effective feather sizes (and in fairness the performance is affected slightly).

I would like to see the glow shadow size slowdown fixed, and the 50 feather pixel limit removed - especially as the limit results in non-recoverable issues. If you have a drawing which uses 50 pix feathering, and then enlarge it, the feathering doesn't increase and so the image becomes all wrong. If you then reduce the object, the feathering doesn't return to it's original value and you permanently lose the look of your object. It's a bit poor really. I'd suggest a new thread if this wants discussing more.