Interweaving vines with 3D text

[dcahall]

That's the essence of it, Dave. I'll leave graphics gymnastics and "pyrotechniques" for the sake of showing off to others who have the talent, but right here is how to bring a good idea to life on a page.

-g

Speaking of things like that, I just went off a played with the pen tool for a few minutes. I found a couple of settings I was not aware of before. I was trying to just draw and my lines kept joining together when I did not want them to. Played with a couple of buttons and "wa la" found out how to turn XP&GD MX into a drawing/painting tool. This might be a good topic for a future tutorial. Kind of makes me see how to use the tool instead of that other product we have discussed.

The more I "play" with this product, the more I see its potential/power. I even started using my Bamboo tablet to try to draw some cartoon characters (need a ton more practice).

@Frances - I tried to pull your drawing apart to examine some of the pieces (like the flowers) but could not get it to break into parts and I noticed that there are some many objects that my laptop started to choke (even just moving the image on the page).

[Gare]

@Dave—


Possible solutions for you:

1. Use a desktop and not a laptop to run Xara. The better the video card, the better the performance you'll notice with Xara—Xara does a lot of direct-to-screen writing to increase fidelity and speed, and I don't know of any laptop that would take a gaming card or similar, which is really what you want to use when working with Xara. You'll see people on tg talk about NVIDEA a lot and support for Open GL and gigs, not MBs of onboard memory. There's a reason for this "excess". It's called performance.

2. Ungroup Frances' phenomenally complicated drawing, copy one part of it to a new document, and then proceed to dissect it. The less you have onscreen, the less Xara has to dynamically update and redraw.

-g

[dcahall]

My laptop has an NVidia graphics card with dedicated memory.

I tried to ungroup here objects many times but nothing happened

[Gare]

@Dave—

Well, I discovered that there are some seemingly version 8-specific effects in the "Spring" artwork because copying it to the clipboard and pasting it into a previous version crashes it. I was able to open it in XDP 8, and Frances, you have a passel of groups in there.

It's possible that the math in the file is pushing the limits of what Xara can draw to screen.

I submitted a crash report.

-g

[BeanPole]

@Dave -

I too have been looking at angelize's file (I am assuming you mean the vines), and I have been able to separate it. In some places you need to ungroup, and in other places you need to remove clip view.

Anyway, I will attach the file I have and you might be able to work with it because I have already split things up. Hope it helps!

[Gare]

Hi Beanpole—

I think Dave is referring t Angelize's second post, #77, where the text is vertically stacked.

you broke up her first submission quite well and this can be of use as we discuss the effect.

Can you take a try at breaking down the Post #77 attachment?

It's got nested groups inside of ClipViews and I think there's a kitchen sink in there somewhere, too!

TIA!

Gary

[BeanPole]

Hi Gare -

Ah! Yes, I had missed that post. Lovely graphic! Makes me long for spring. We had quite a bit of snow on Sunday & Monday, now more today.

I was able to ungroup that graphic as well, but for sure my system took longer at it. Also longer to download and upload. I will include the ungrouped file.

[angelize]

Hi guys, sorry my file was so complex but I created that file using a lap top It's got a quad core with Radeon Dual Graphics. It runs Xara quite well, that's no to say though that this file wasn't getting sluggish.

There shouldn't have been anything DPX specific that would have prevented the file from being used in an older version. The only new feature I used was the eraser which creates an opacity mask that should be able to be displayed correctly from version 6 up. Each leaf and flower is a separate group and the main vine is three shapes layered feathered and clipped together, and each off shoot vine is two shapes clipped together. I assure you that the kitchen sink is still in the kitchen!

Oh and Beanpole out here on the west coast spring has already arrived spring bulbs are popping up and I'll have daffodils in bloom in a few weeks if the weather co-operates

[BeanPole]

Hi guys,

I finally bit the bullet and decided to try the vine. Ah, life would be so much easier without shadows! Anyways, I spent a whole lot of time on this one and really learned a lot.

Dave,
Thanks for starting this thread. It has been very interesting and very challenging!

angelize,
Thank you for your files I was able to pull apart and scrutinize. I used your floor for my graphic, but created green grass using your example. Also studied your leaves for the vines.

Gare,
Thank you for the free floral font. Also, your comments on wall shadows out doors . . . never thought of that before! And your comments on composition. I'm thinking particularly of the picture of zone. This helped a lot as I created a fake board to set the letters on and that gave me some perspectives.

Please let me know what you think, and if I missed something.

[angelize]

Beanpole, that's very nice, I love the cute little bunnies! I'm glad my file was helpful to you. One suggestion about the leaves, they look great but they are all identical. If you take a look at any plant or vine you will notice that even though the leaves are very much alike they will have differences too. I made 4 leaves each one slightly different and then as I worked my way alone the vine I varied the angle and used the mold tool on some of them and some I skewed sightly.