To make a collection of your own bitmap fills a permanent folder in the Fills gallery (and I'm going to make this a FAQ!):

1. Create a folder on your hard drive for only the bitmaps you want available in Xara, just for organization's sake. for example: C:\MyFills.

2. Put your bitmaps in there. It's best if they're seamless tiling ones and you can use JPEG, BMP (which is sort of a legacy bitmap file format), TIF, PSD, and PNG. PNG is terrific because you can build transparent regions into it.

3. In Xara, choose Utilities>Galleries>Fill Gallery.

4. On the fill Gallery, click Disc fills. This take you to a dialog box of your hard drive structure.

5. Navigate to C:\MyFills, and click the folder icon to select it.

6. Click Add.

In a moment after Xara indexes and builds thumbnails for the folder, you have the fills you put in this folder every time you launch Xara. When applying a seamless fill, go up to the Infobar after applying the fill and choose Repeating from the Tiling options drop-downlost so you can scale and rotate the pattern.

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The tiles I attached in the previous post are procedural textures. All fractals are procedural, but not all procedural textures use fractal math. There are lots of legacy programs that will lt you build a procedural tiling bitmap; Filter Forge is a member of TalkGraphics if you'd like to get a beginning on creating these interesting textures.

The program I used for the previous four examples is a fairly old program called TextureMaker by Reichard Software; they haven't updated their website in over five years so I can't really recommend their product, useful as it is.

My Best,

Gary

Oh, yeah...to add your Xara files to the Designs Gallery, do the same thing I outlined for adding fills to the Fill Gallery.