Who needs a Ray Gun when you've got XX...

[HayTay]

The following posts are experiments with creating rays using different methods in XX/XXP. This one was created using two circles having no fill and dashed lines that were converted to shapes before applying a 500 step blend between them.

Kinda cool but redraws are noticeably slow and it's off because of the dash spacing (note the ray in the 12 o'clock position).

More to go,
Harry

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[HayTay]

OK, here's the ray from the first post with the blend's position profile altered to create some space between the blend steps. I also reduced the number of steps to enhance the effect. A few other shapes were added to cover the ends and add a just a bit more depth to the image. I threw in a nice lemony background and got a strange looking spoked ray, coned wheel, lemon-lime, thing-a-ma-bob.

How 'bout that,
Harry

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[HayTay]

For the rays used in this image, I created a 70 step blend between 2 vector shapes that were then blended and rotated along an existing circle (ellipse). Just another way to create a sun burst effect using rays. As you can see I added a few more elements and it started to look like one of Gary's famous eye-ball images. I must be reading too many of his posts as it seems to be subliminally affecting my creativity. Hmmm, it might also be the start of a neat stereogram. I'll have to see what I can do with the image in that regard.

'Til next time,
Harry

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[HayTay]

For the ray in this sun burst arrangement I started off with a 96 sided polygon. Then, using the Shape Editor Tool, I created a wedge segment using the two points for one edge and the center of the polygon. I then clicked twice on the wedge and set the rotation center point to the tip of the wedge at the center of the polygon. After setting the angle constraint on the General Tab of the Options (Ctrl+Shft+O) to 3.75 (360/96) I proceeded to duplicate the wedge 95 times to create all of the rays. The rays can then grouped as desired, deleted, colored and/or modified to create whatever effect you're looking for.

For the center image I added a few circles of varying diameter and no fill to give it that manhole cover, dart board look.

So, if anyone has any other cool ways to produce a circular ray (sun burst) arrangement I'd like to hear about it. Anyone?

That's all for now,
Harry

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[juergen]

Pretty mighty cool "eyeball"

Juergen

[zaphodeist]

Nice work Harry Particularly like the eyeball, subliminally influenced or not

[HayTay]

This is for anyone that didn't quite follow along with the sketchy explanations I gave to accompany the Ray graphics posted earlier in this thread. A special thanks to Rik for his compliments and never ending curiosity.

The first mini-tutorial in this series is for Creating a Ray Sun Burst Effect Using the Blend Tool. I'll post the two (at least) mini-tuts for the other methods I used to create rays when I get them finished.

May you find this useful,
Harry

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[angelize]

Very cool tutorial Harry. I usually use Spray a very convenient and useful little utility written by Dmitry. It is Free from Dmitry's site It works with all versions of Xara Xtreme, and Web designer too.

[HayTay]

Pretty mighty cool "eyeball"

Nice work Harry Particularly like the eyeball, subliminally influenced or not

"Eye" thank you both.

Juergen, neat looking radioactive, alien looking, piece of space matter. I take it you made the rays with Dmitry's Spray Utility mentioned by Angelize?

Frances, good call. I've had the Spray utility installed on my PC for some time now. I use it occasionally for all sorts of effects.

Cheers,
Harry

[juergen]

Its lines, feathered with glow shadow. You can put 2 with slighly different shadow colors and different length on top of eachother to vary the glow.

Juergen