Beware: X3D will seriously damage...

[fencepost]

I, too, am very impressed! You guys are the best.

A

[Terry]

John, Egg, Mike and Fencepost,

That was my first try at an animation in Xara. I was wavering on purchasing X3D until I saw Mike's "Yin Yang Yong" gif. I grabbed that gif and pulled it apart in Photoimpact's gif editor. I saw then that I could use X3D as an image generator for Xara (which had not really occurred to me before ... duh!).

Now I'm working on a more complex animation that will probably take quite a while, but this one was a quickie. Here's what I did:

1. Create the circular plate with holes in it as a flat shape in Xara.

2. Copy the shape with ctrl-C.

3. Paste the shape to the "button" in X3D.

4. Extrude it to taste. Since this was a test on my part, I just left the lighting and most of the other options on default.

5. Position the extruded shape at -180, 0, 0, and copy it with ctrl-C.

6. Flip back to Xara and open another workspace as an animation. Paste the shape. It appears in frame 1. Pop up the frame window and add frame 2. Go back to X3D.

7. Position the X3D shape to -170, 0, 0, and copy it. Go back to Xara and paste. Add the next frame. Repeat until you get to +170. You'll have 36 frames. http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

8. Close X3D and go back to Xara. You can now do a test -- you'll have a shape that rotates left-to-right 360 degrees.

9. Now go to frame 2. Select the shape and rotate it 10 degrees counterclockwise. Go to frame 3, rotate it 20 degrees. Continue until you have rotated frame 36 350 degrees. You now have the twirling shape.

10. Create the "ball" by pulling a circle to the appropriate size, making it a black shape, cloning it, coloring the cloned shape to taste, adding a circular transparency to the colored shape and grouping the two shapes.

11. Copy the ball with ctrl-C. Assuming that you've done #10 in frame 1, and the ball is where you want it to start, flip to frame two.

12. Paste the ball. Move it to where you think the motion of the twirling image might have moved it from the position in the previous frame. Repeat until you get to frame 36 and you're done.

I thought about adding a "floor" and bouncing a second ball off the floor as part of the sequence, but I got another idea and spent the rest of the evening pursuing it. It won't be done any time soon... http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gif

[simsmj]

Terry
That's an excellent example of thinking out of the box, you don't have to consider Xara3D's capabilities in isolation, you can process XaraX's shapes in Xara3D, then use the results in XaraX again, and there is no reason you can't go round that loop more than once if you need to.

I hope you'll post often!

Mike

[John Rayner]

Vectors cut and paste to X3D6, but Bitmaps cut and paste back. In particular, transparent pngs... It is nice to know. Will most likely use that.