The September 2012 Tutorial - All About Drawing & Control Points

[cyberqueen]

Hi cyberqueen—

If you go back one page to post #15, the Administrator has already set up an area and a questionnaire to help her and TalkGraphics figure out what is wrong. This has been going on for almost 5 days now, and the main goal at the moment is to let members watch the video, and the anomoly is being addressed as a secondary, but very real consideration.

Thanks very much, Gary! I didn't read far enough to see post #15. I'm relieved to know that the problem isn't just mine (relief probably not shared by tech support ), and I'm very grateful to the Administrator for her efforts to deal with the problem and help those of us affected see the video.

[Gare]

What I meant, stygg, is that I never had any experience with girls, nice or otherwise, before I met my wife.

Do I still have to sleep on the sofa now, Barb?

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++


By the way, the rendered model wasn't really hard to do.

1. Export your 2 shapes (plus I added one for liquid) as Illustrator (*.ai) files.

2. Import them to a modeling program (I used Cinema 4D).

3. Perform a "Potter's wheel" operation to make the 2D shape a 3D object. This is the "magic" step where the drawing becomes realized as a 3D shape.

4. Add lighting, apply the appropriate materials, render to PNG or TIF file format.

You'll notice that I used a Mould on the lettering on the bottle. I could have mapped a bitmap copy of the text to the bottle itself in the modeling program, but it would have taken too much time when it's easily "faked" in Xara.

-g

[stygg2003]

I've just looked at the price of Cinema 4D and also at a five day course in Machester to get to grips with 4D.....£995! : plus buying 4D as well I think it will have to go on the back burner for a while, I need to upgrade Xara first

Stygg

[Gare]

@stygg—

You have absolutely no reason to want or need for Cinema 4D, my friend. Yeah, the results can be "sexy graphics", especially when you can render photorealistic glass and other reflective items, but let it be known that a Xara GrandMaster such as Ron Duke and the late, great Alan Burns could draw real world objects that look better than a 3D modeling program can render if operated by an inexperienced user.

I always get thrills out of looking at the wireframe view quality mode and some of the clip art Xara provides over the years. A lot of spectacular stuff is accomplished using very few shapes, you know?

Drawing and modeling are two entirely different disciplines. And the price tag is a business expense. I took up modeling almost 20 years ago when I was laid up after hip replacement surgery, and had a lot of spare time. What you use to express a graphical idea all depends on what the idea is, stygg. I use Xara a LOT, but there are times when I have a specialized need and a modeling program is appropriate. This is particularly true when I need an animated segment for the monthly tutorial and I have a client or two who are interested in animation and not my drawing work.

To bring this back to relevance, you learn how to draw shapes in Xara and you're that much closer to being able to do basic stuff in programs such as Blender (which is free at Blender.org). Modeling programs use vectors, almost exactly like Xara does, except the environment is 3 dimensional instead of 2. The cologne bottle is a collection of shapes in Xara and in the modeling program. It doesn't become "real" until you tell the modeling program to execute a final bitmap render of the scene:



stygg, I'm not sure I'd ever start learning about modeling and animation if I was starting at my age today. If you like what you see that I do, understand that I began 20 years ago when I was 39, okay?

My Best,

gary

[mwenz]

From the 3D Graphics forum, a few doors down. Blender is used by several here.

http://www.talkgraphics.com/search.php?searchid=1218338

Take care, Mike

[angelize]

Here is an example of a project that started out with a curved line drawn with the pen tool. I used Xara's 3D extrude tool, and added a custom effect in filter forge, Then back to Xara for a few extra details.

[wizard509]

I'm not sure I'd ever start learning about modeling and animation if I was starting at my age today. If you like what you see that I do, understand that I began 20 years ago when I was 39, okay?

My Best,

gary

I'm evidently much older than you gare so maybe that's why it's been so difficult for me to learn Blender, but now and again I still try.

[Big Frank]

I've just looked at the price of Cinema 4D and also at a five day course in Machester to get to grips with 4D.....£995! : plus buying 4D as well

Download and play with Caligari TrueSpace. Last I heard it was still free and available. A fairly steep learning curve, but a lot of creative fun to be had, and for a highly professional and mature 3D software package, the price is very attractive!

[Gare]

We're going O/T again...and I'm going to help.

>>trueSpace 7 as of 9/26/2012 at FreewareFiles<<

Microsoft bought a very financially troubled Caligari Corporation about 3 years ago, and mothballed trueSpace. This version has a good rendering engine, it's much harder to use than version 3 (the best version IMO), and because it's based around volume modeling (solids) instead of parametric modeling (surfaces, not solid), you will have a really un-fun time trying to import Xara shapes as Illustrator files.

Trivia, to get us back to control points and paths: did you know that you can apply both an arrowhead and a dashed line to a path segment? And if you then choose Arrange>Convert Line to Shape, the line becomes a shape with a fill but no outline width (although you can add a new one now), and this new shape (which is no longer a path) can be filled, and also extruded. I'm using an open path in the attached file, although you can do the same with a closed path, but the arrowhead gets a little funky in its positioning.



@Larry—modeling is a mature area of computer graphics, and actually it was growing at the same time or even before pure vector graphics illustration. I recall experiments in 3D animation from 1976 that James Blinn at the University of Utah was doing. Back then, you had to film a video monitor if you wanted to keep and share an animation!

There is absolutely no reason not to be overall satisfied with Xara's Extrude tool. It does only one function of modeling, but the results can be accomplished in seconds.

My point is that any "age barrier" to accomplishing modeling artwork has to do with the sheer volume of information, options, and learning one has to go through. It's massive, not hard. It helps to be able to "see" a 3D scene in your head—you can compose it onscreen more quickly.

The biggest discouragement might be that you can only really see 2 out of the three dimensions on a monitor at one tome, and this is why many modeling programs offer a 4 view heads-up display. It's sort of like the stereograms that Gary Priester makes—some people can intuitively adjust their vision and their brains and immediately see stuff popping off the page. I'm in the minority: I have a lot of difficulty orienting my eye-brain responses to "see" the stereogram stuff.

But I sort of intuitively picked up how to work in simulated 3D space starting in 1992 with as product called Macromedia MacroModel. It made sense to me, so I was able to get right to the tools. I think this was because I'd watched Star Trek re-runs for many years.

Again, it's not hard to learn. It's just a lot to learn.

-g

[Big Frank]

Anybody with plenty of time and patience can learn how to use a 3D app. I have little of either, hence my mastery of the genre is severely limited.

I also do not use the pen tool (I use it so infrequently that I had to switch to Xara to look up the name of the tool), so my mastery of that little feller is also extremely limited. I think you're right, you either like one or the other, the shape editor probably being my most-used tool.