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**molucca** · 09 February 2009, 06:17 PM

In with a few and out with a few more. Just make things and see how they work.

Rich

**Albacore** · 09 February 2009, 10:07 PM

Gee Rich you work too fast for me to keep up! just managed to get the R's to look right and then moved onto the picture frame sorted out that out. Have never really used Live effects since after the first few weeks after it was introduced until this thread. I have found it requires a bit of planning ahead to get the effects that you want and it is not just a straight, click there, move this slider to here and we are all sorted. Thanks Rich for giving us the info and supplying the material. Found the info that you have given on how you store your fills extremely helpful. I am still not convinced that the the Live Effects tool is the best tool in the programme but you have convinced me enough that just after Christmas I bought Eye Candy 5 Textures as I had a small private job to do and it saved loads of time. Great thread Rich and thanks for you help and work that has gone into it.
Cheers
Peter

**molucca** · 10 February 2009, 06:05 PM

Thanks Peter,

I made seamless tiles for the matt part of the frames. I found a few useful for the frames. They are good for building textures, too. I looked at a lot of texture programs, but decided to use what I learned to develop a method in Xara.

An E3 colored frame, just another option to color the Xara composed drawings.

Rich

**ginger44** · 12 February 2009, 10:59 PM

Originally Posted by molucca

I tried applying a leaf as an image stroke, but it got stretch too much ans lost the quality of the gloss.

The bamboo leaf applied as a vector stroke and exported out as a PDF. The file had so many nodes that I had difficulty moving it. I did node smoothing in XXP. A little better control than E3.

Rich

Really like that effect.

Making some headway with E3 and discovered that this ver has been 'crippled'. Image fills is the only section that will allow additions, maps, textures and edges will not - although the help and the 3rd party tutorials indicate that you can.

Yvonne

**molucca** · 13 February 2009, 12:38 AM

Yvonne,

I don't understand what you mean by not allowing additions.

Maps, textures and fringes are in hidden folders. There is a short cut in the program group.

Rich

**molucca** · 13 February 2009, 02:04 PM

The short cut will open the hidden folders to all the resources. This was a change after Win98. Don't know why. It took me a long time to find the answer.

Fringes are affected by the shade of the bottom row of pixes in the image.

Rich

**ginger44** · 13 February 2009, 07:55 PM

Oh crap !! thank you, that's a bit anti-climatic ........

When I read this in the Studio E3 tutorial, I made an incorrect assumption - that it would be a directory off the programme directory. I found files with the correct names, but they were txt files. "Expression 3/Images/Envmaps sub-folder on your hard drive"

I did do a search, unsuccesfully, to see if anything was hidden elsewhere - need to get a good search utility..... or just focus !!

Located now, thank you again.

Yvonne