Blends & Fills

[Manny]

Hi all, I'm attaching a file that I've toying around with to try and get a wood look to letters. If you notice on the left foot of the letter M the wood effect is great but if you look at the darkened side of that same letter don't you think that for the effect of giving the letter perspective that the boards should show a slightly more acute angle; I mean it looks good but the eye knows that something doesn't look exactly right. Does it sound like gibberish or am I explaining myself correctly. Anyway all advice would be greatly appreciated since I'm planning to to use this same effect with different fills. Looking forward to hearing from you. Thanks.

Manny

[angelize]

Hi Manny, First I've moved this post to the Xara graphics chat area.

To get the correct perspective on the sides you will need to fill separate shapes and use the mold tool. Gary Bouton explains it in this Xara Xone video tutorial In the video gary demonstrates how to texture a 3D bitmap but the general idea is the same.

[Albacore]

The way that the M has been filled is that someone has taken the 3D shape and gave it an all over direct bitmap fill. Then placed transparencies to give depth and shape. The reason why it doesn't work as wood has a different texture on the end grain so just shading using transparencies looks wrong. I very quickly did a M for you to look at and take apart. What I did was to get a font that I wanted to use type in in, --- Copied it onto clipboard (Ctrl+C), ---- Convert to Editable Shapes (Ctrl+Shift+S), ---- Cloned the shape (Ctrl+K), --- Moved the shape down and to the right, selected both and Combined both shapes into one (Ctrl+1), ---- Gave this shape a Bitmap Fill (I used Walnut from the Fill Gallery), ---- Pasted what I had on clipboard in place (Ctrl+Shift+V), --- then use the Shape Editor (F4) to draw in the ends (before you start this on the top menu make sure you select the magnet), ---- Give the end fill a dark grey/black colour, then play with the Transparency values to get the effect you want, give the top shapes a white/light grey fill.

[Egg Bramhill]

Xara3D6 is the best tool for this type of 3D effect as you can place a side texture to the extrusion.

[Manny]

Thanks again for your assistance and helpful advice but unfortunately I'm not getting the results I wanted so the battle still goes on. Thanks.

Manny

[csehz]

Xara3D6 is the best tool for this type of 3D effect as you can place a side texture to the extrusion.

Thanks does it mean that Xara3D6 works differently than the Designer Pro extrude tool? Because there unfortunately not possible to put side texture to the extrusion, only manually tracing through the sides and giving fill to the shapes

[Manny]

Your suggestion works really well when you don't have straight lines as you would if you were trying to make your text look like old boards: I would suggest that the guys who designed the program might look into this since I would feel you could obtain spectacular text effects of say superimposing the American flag on text. I've experimented with it an it is awesome but there's still that nagging at the back of your mind that when you look at the text the stripes on the legs of the letter for example the letter M should have a slight angled look for the horizontal lines on the face of the text; but in truth the effect is still spectacular and most people don't even notice. I will still like to be able to do that down the road. By the way Xara 3D does not do well in situations like this since the sides tend to distort and stretch no matter what fill your trying to achieve. Thanks for the good advice.

Manny

[angelize]

Did you watch the video I linked to?

[wizard509]

Thanks does it mean that Xara3D6 works differently than the Designer Pro extrude tool? Because there unfortunately not possible to put side texture to the extrusion, only manually tracing through the sides and giving fill to the shapes

I get the same results with Xara 3D Maker as I did using X3D6 texturing the sides. The Perspective looks correct.


Manny is correct the perspective using the 3D tool is definitely off. The 3D tool does not have the ability to texture the side differently like the X3D programs do. So you have to go to a lot of extra work to get the job done as has been described by others.

The 3D tool is not as full featured as the Xara 3D programs which is a reason to own those also just for problems such as this. I may experiment with this to see if I can find another answer.

[Egg Bramhill]

By the way Xara 3D does not do well in situations like this since the sides tend to distort and stretch no matter what fill your trying to achieve.

Manny, I don't find this. If you look at my original post it works as you desire.

There's no distortion/stretch even on complicated bevels as below.