Remove and reapply a mould- Is this a bug?

[colin_e]

I was aiming to follow the mini-tutorial on how t draw a car tyre shown in post number 8 in this thread.

This uses a mould to shape the tread. Unfortunately moulds are one of the few "opaque" effects in Xara, once you've applied a mould you can't get at the constituent parts, either using control-click or from the page and object gallery.

Thus, if you decide you need to edit a component of the mould, say to change a fill colour, you have to "pick apart" the mould and then rebuild it.

I thought this would be simple, if tedious, because you can copy/save and then re-paste the mould shape. However I discovered that when i re-pasted the copied mould shape back over the original tread drawing, the shape basically went to hell.



I haven't used the mould tool much because I find it intractable (for example the drawing handles don't behave handles do in the shape editor). Is this bug (aka "feature) of the mould tool, or am I missing a key step?

Regards: Colin

[Su Lawrence]

Hi Colin

This is an old issue with moulds. You can regain the former mould shape sometimes by noting the height/width of the mould before removal (or create a clone/duplicate for reference), then after pasting the mould back ... select it with the selector tool and with aspect ratio OFF (in the selector tool infobar) readjust the deformed mould by entering the height/width values (pixel units are best) and pressing enter key. It is not a perfect solution by any means, but maybe easier than having to remould it again.

Alternatively you can select the mould then using the shape editor tool you can nudge the mould points (for finer control), by clicking on the arrows (or entering an amount) in the shape editor infobar ... (which is the only way I've found to nudge mould points in a similar way to normal shapes).

You don't say which version of Xara you are using, so am not sure the above is still applicable as I am still using an older version ... but hope this helps a bit.

Regards

Su

[colin_e]

Thanks for the info Su. With the "non editable" nature of moulds anyway this is a pretty severe limitation.

Moulds feel to me like a feature of Xara that could do with a rewrite+update. Something like a mesh deform tool where all the parts inside the mould are accessible (by control-click or the page+object navigator) and some more usefu parametric shapes, like true cylindrical and perspective cylindrical moulds would be ideal.

Regards: Colin

Hi Colin

This is an old issue with moulds. You can regain the former mould shape sometimes by noting the height/width of the mould before removal (or create a clone/duplicate for reference), then after pasting the mould back ... select it with the selector tool and with aspect ratio OFF (in the selector tool infobar) readjust the deformed mould by entering the height/width values (pixel units are best) and pressing enter key. It is not a perfect solution by any means, but maybe easier than having to remould it again.

Alternatively you can select the mould then using the shape editor tool you can nudge the mould points (for finer control), by clicking on the arrows (or entering an amount) in the shape editor infobar ... (which is the only way I've found to nudge mould points in a similar way to normal shapes).

You don't say which version of Xara you are using, so am not sure the above is still applicable as I am still using an older version ... but hope this helps a bit.

Regards

Su

[Burpee]

Hi, with contours, bevels, clipviews and moulds, I 'convert to editable shapes' then ungroup. This tears the object down to its basic parts. I don't know if this will help but it can be right for some instances. Of course this can not be reversed except by undoing.

[iamtheblues]

Hi Nancy, it's woth pointing out that by converting to editable shapes and ungrouping, it is possible to then copy the result to the clipboard then undo to before the conversion took place and then paste the clipboard contents "back in time", as it were. This can be very useful.
Saludos,
Bob.

[amoore]

Before doing something like converting to editable shapes, I generally make a clone and store it on a "hold" page or layer so I always have access to the source, even weeks later. May seem like extra effort at the time, but it's proven to be a valuable practice.