Adding Textures To Extrusions

[ss-kalm]

In this thread it was discussed about adding textures to the sides of extrusions. I was under the impression that this couldn't be done in either Xara Xtreme or Xara 3D6. Does anyone know how to do this?

[Soquili]

Keith you can apply a texture to the "text sides". It has limitations that make it very difficult to place readable text on the side of an extruded shape.

[ss-kalm]

Well I Never ---- Obviously ---- I knew that was there, but have never had occasion to use it, and so didn't even think about it. Thank you Bill.

[Soquili]

Always happy to help when I can.

[salaam]

An old trick, a bit rough and it won't spin.

[ivan louette]

In Xtreme Pro 4 you can obtain some interesting effects with plugins : http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthread.php?t=32098

kindly,
ivan

[AndFarr]

Or you could just construct them, with textured fills, and fake your extrusion.
- Andy

( Global Warming )

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a33...kery-2-opt.jpg

[simsmj]

Textures on the sides of extruded shapes in Xara3D are distorted because they are still applied to the front of the shape, so they appear severely foreshortened if viewed from the side, depending on the shape of the bevel. If you know that, you can pre-distort the part of the textures that will show on the sides to compensate, to some extent.

The steeper the angle of the bevel compared to the plane of the face, the more distorted the texture. A squared bevel will only show single pixels stretched all the way from front to back, while an angled or curved bevel can show more pixels between the extreme outer edge of the bevel, and the point where it touches the front or rear face.

This ring is spinnable, but it would take too many frames to animate smoothly enough to show the text clearly, so I've opted to just show three frames. The X3D file is 2.64M unfortunately, or I'd post that, too, so I'll post the Xar file instead. I'm not sure why the X3D file is so large. If I can reduce it, I'll post it later.

Mike

[ss-kalm]

Mike, you are absolutely amazing. All hail the king .........

[simsmj]

The huge size of the X3D file was due to the gold texture I used, so this version uses a flat fill instead. It is only about 256K.

It has two 60 degree bevelled rings superimposed on each other, and runs a 1% Ripple animation, to vertically separate the rings. This arrangement effectively gives me independent upper and lower surfaces, otherwise one of the surfaces would simply show a mirror version of the other surface's texture.

If you load up the file into Xara3D, it will run the animation, just pause it on frame 2. Then you can drag the ring around with the mouse, and you can see all the text.

You can try changing the parameters of the bevel and extrusions, but the textures were specifically designed to fit the rings as currently set up, via trial and error, mostly the latter

Mike

PS Thanks for the kind words.