Brushed Metal

[Leslie Sanford]

I want to run through how I create a brushed metal effect in Xara and hopefully get some feedback on my method. I'm still very much a Xara newbie, and I'm wondering if there are easier, better ways of doing this.

1. Create a large rectangle. It should be larger than the area in which you want to apply a brushed metal look.

2. Fill the rectangle with a color, applying whatever gradient you wish.

3. Go to the live effects and apply the Distortion Filter->Add Noise effect to the rectangle. Set the Strength to about 30, the Density to about 50, and uncheck the Colored check box.

4. Next, apply the Soften Filter->Motion Blur effect to the rectangle. Set the Direction to 0 and the Distance to about 10.

At this point we have a rectangle that should have a nice brushed metal look to it. What we want to do next is create our target shape. This is the shape that we want to apply the brushed metal to. This shape can be any shape the only requirement is that it is somewhat smaller than our original rectangle.

5. Right-click on the original rectangle and select the "Create Bitmap Copy..." menu item from the pop-up menu. This will bring up the Create Bitmap options dialog box.

6. Click on the Create button in the dialog box.

7. Create the target shape.

8. Place the target shape over the bitmap copy of our original rectangle.

9. While holding down the Shift key, left-click on both the target shape and the bitmap copy.

10. Right-click and choose Combine Shapes->Slice (cut) Shapes.

Our target shape now has the brushed metal look applied to it (so to speak). You can delete the bitmap copy (and the original rectangle, if you're done).

The reason for the bitmap copy is that if you try to slice out the target shape from the original rectangle the sides will be blurred on the resulting shape. This is the only way I've been able to figure out around that.