Simple spider's web vector

[cimbian]

Hi Sark,

Excellent, I now understand.

This is a good tutorial about a subject that I doubt I am the only one is unaware of, thank you very much... Maybe you should make a sticky of your last post?

[cimbian]

Sark,

It has been a while and I should have thanked you for the explanation.

the great thing is that I needed to do the same thing today to make a diamond gem-stone logo for a friend... Of course I had forgotten the detail but returned here and went through the process again and 'bingo'.

Thanks, again.

[Sark]

It's a nice little trick. It would be great if you could run it from a script, but as much as I tried I was never able to get it to function correctly.

Sark

[sallybode]

Well, X3 has the paint bucket tool which instantly recognizes the interior of shapes and creates objects and fills them with the desired fill.

And it is working because Corel included a script which was written to do just that and then assigned tools to the property bar to implement the editing changes.

Of course, for one to build this on their own, could be done. Maybe if you have X3, or download a trial of it, you can replay your actions by recording your own script and see why the Paint Bucket tool works.

But even so you can set the record button and record your steps and see if it works on a similar object.

Or get someone to record the actions of the Paint Bucket tool and compare them to see what the Paint Bucket is doing script-wise.

[Sark]

Well, X3 has the paint bucket tool which instantly recognizes the interior of shapes and creates objects and fills them with the desired fill.

So Sally, you're saying you can now fill any apparently enclosed space in X3 by using a function of the Paint Bucket tool???

If this has been added to X3 via just a script, then it may be possible to reproduce it. In fact you can do some amazing things with scripts, Oberon prove that. Still not sure if it would be totally compatible with earlier versions though.

Ultimately I rarely use this function, so the current workaround is quick enough for those rare occasions, but if Corel has added this ability, it does make you wonder if Corel may now actually be taking an interest in what users are discussing.

Sark

[Grafixman]

How accurate is the paint bucket tool in X3? Sounds like a time saver to me, specially if you're doing a lot of colored line art drawings in it. Being able to flood fill areas defined by separate overlapping lines is definitely good. Are the shapes produced by the paint bucket tool node heavy? Can it bridge small gaps like Flash's paint bucket?

[sallybode]

The X3 Paint Bucket is quite accurate and it does add nodes, but you can easily control how many with the node edit tool selectes, select all nodes and move the slider so that you retain the integrity of the shape without it being too node heavy.

You can do the download trial and see how it works. The script as I record it and look at what the Paint Bucket does is it invokes a new command that 12 and earlier versions do not have. So if you have X3 no problem, if not, then back to the drawing board, it isn't telling me how to go about it.

The nodes which are created, G-man, are dependent upon how many nodes are all ready there in the shape you are filling. The best way is to reduce the shape you are filling to a reasonable amount of nodes. Just makes sense, as it will mirror the nodes internally of the nodes it finds and creates a shape from, if that is making sense.

So as far as coloring your cartoons you do, I thin you'd find it rather useful.

The main thing I don't like with X3 are printing delays. So long as it is something that can be printed out of 12, I save to 12 and print from there. Or make a .pdf and print from that. But the print from 12 is better. There are many tweaks I find I make in order to get exactly what I want from printing from a .pdf that 12 understands far better than the .pdf file interprete does.

And I like the way paragraph and character formatting was in 12 and previous. All the other users don't seem to like those changes either. Maybe the next update will resolve these issue.

X3 is pretty stable. And that it shows you how your inks look in overprint preview with is on by default, helps you get more consistent print output.

A friend of mine gave me a good tip on something called "SQUIZZ". Which was a plugin for DRAW and PhotoPaint in 9.0, he told me it works if you copy and paste it into the plugins folder under Program files: C:\Program Files\Corel\CorelDRAW Graphics Suite 13\Plugins\Squizz. What Sqizz does is push pixels around similar to Goo, not as sophisticated but it is cool. Works much better than warping with a grid in PhotoPaint.

The most useful upgrade in X3 is using the PowerTracing feature. It does have a learning curve but once you figure out how to take advantage of it, it is a big improvement generally over the trace of previous versions. It is easier to get the result your are interested in when comparing to Xara trace. And you can specify colors from any palette you need to work with so it is a time saver right there. Additionally because of tracing jpegs you get more colors than you really want, and you can merge these colors. This could be improved upon, but it is a lot more useful and a huge timesaver in recreation of existing logos or in changing a pixel artwork to vector.