February 2013 Guest Tips and Tricks - Making Surreal Backgrounds with Xara Fractals

[Gare]

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.

[dcahall]

Thanks for the reply. I went off a discovered this procedure after I made the post. Should have explored it first but others may benefit from it.

I have already added them to me fill gallery. Every day I am finding these hidden treasure which just keep opening doors and expanding the uses of this product.

I am going to take some more time and go play with the Live Effects (at least the ones that come with the product).

I will never be able to repay you and some others for your patience and guidance.

[TXAlba]

Thanks Gary, incorporated your baws (ooh errr missus) into my avatar! me likey

[Gare]

@Dave—

Mehdi has a few plug-ins that ship with Xara. Off the top of my head, I think he has Classic Eraser (for making an alpha in an image based on color), but he also offers a lot more Xara compatible plug-ins for free HERE.

You might want to check out "Blots" and "Kaleidoscope" because I think these might give you the seamless tiling you'd want for making textures.

I could be wrong, but they're free. Hey.

-g

[dcahall]

They have some neat looking plug-ins. I having a problem trying to install them with Windows 8 but I have emailed their Customer Support since they do not mention Windows 8 on their site.

[Gare]

I wish you luck, Dave. I'm not sure, but I believe it's a one-man operation, plus these are free plug-ins. If I gave away stuff (wait a second... I do!) support for them would be near the bottom of my To-Do List, you know?

I'm happy with the stability of win 8, but i'm happier still that I did a dual boot. And I seem to live in Win 7.

My Best,

Gary

[stygg2003]

Gary hope you don't mind but I used the casa Final xar file you posted to try one more thing in Fractals before I drive every one fractal mad All I've done is add a base rectangle that is an opacity mask with a linear trans., if your happy about the clouds but want to change the colour, all you have to do is select the opacity mask and change it plus you can alter the trans. for some nice effects. I've posted two images to view plus the xar file if anyone wants to try this. Thought it might be useful Instant colour change

Stygg

[Gare]

The photo-editing idea took on a life of its own and I moved it to its own topic

here.

Today's prediction is: cloudy with a chance of group participation later in the afternoon.

-g

[csehz]

I also like in Xara that the .xar file is 12 kbyte :-)



Fractal_bg.xar