Layers compositions and image warp?

[Gare]

I am not sure really I understand that on-the-fly argument.

KIR23? I am trying very hard for this not to be an argument.

I'm stating a fact.

Have you been using a vector drawing program since the late 1980s? Then, there was wireframe mode in which you worked, and only if you thought you were happy with a drawing in CorelDRAW or Illustrator did you switch to preview mode, and tediously and laboriously, the program re-drew your vector artwork to screen as a bitmap image.

Everything you see onscreen is a bitmap image, although programmers try very hard to convince artists, especially newer ones, that you're drawing vectors on screen in real time. You're not. Your screen is made up of picture elements (that's where the term 'pixel' comes from)—but the reality of working by proxy and creating all this stupendous artwork on a computer is almost entirely a matter of a program calculating vector color, fill, width and so on (at least within a vector drawing program), and then quickly telling the system how to render this art to screen.

Apple dabbled with a PostScript display years ago and this was to be an honest-to-gosh vector display, but redraw times were unacceptable.

Chances are almost 100% that your monitor is pixel-based, and therefore Xara, or any vector application has to tell the video subsystem to draw what you've laid down on-the-fly.

You have every reason to trust me, and very few not to, KIR23.

My Best,

Gary

[KIR23]

3ds max or Blender do pretty same with a single difference probably that the rasterisation goes with a help of a videocard and in 3d space projected onto a flat screen with not only solid color fill but texture fill also. Maybe it's a time to learn and borrow something from 3d soft.

I have not been using vector soft in 80s but I perfectly understand what you are talking about. Still think it should b possible to do now days. Again let it be as it is. But for document variants/compositions I see the program really need only the same solo buttons in name window.

[Gare]

@KIR23—

I've had the privilege to speak with a few of the programmers at The Xara Group over the years, and they do indeed learn, lend and borrow from the 3D domain. Obviously you won't see it regarding your request, not right now because you've only requested this a few days ago, but the CEO worked on a universal "uber" 3D descriptor environment years ago, open source, and Adobe and Corel both had to learn something from The Xara Group when Xara first came out and offered beautiful anti-aliased vector shapes on-the-fly. I remember when you had to export to bitmap before you had a reasonable good-looking vector drawing before Xara.


I’m just throwing the following out here—and then I'll get out of here because this is O/T—but there might be some confusion about what a modeling/rendering/gaming development product can and cannot do with textures.

When a “3D’ program wraps a texture around an object, regardless of subdivisions or any other of the neat things a modeling program can do, how smooth the texture looks depends a lot on how the texture is built.

Here are your options in the 3D domain, and many of us are familiar with one out of the two options: a complex texture can be represented by importing a bitmap, ad it can also be whipped up by using and modifying a procedural texture.

A procedural texture is a “recipe”, code that is usually set up for the end user with options for feature size, specularity, and other properties. A procedural texture can be thought of as resolution-independent only in the sense that it can be declared at just about any size, but the final appearance of it is only determined at final render time when the rendering engine has to do the math to produce the features.

Here’s a visual example of this stuff. In this screen snag, I’ve applied a bitmap texture of bricks to two cubes in Cinema 4D. The cube on the right has very poor features because I increased the bitmap size to much larger than its original resolution.



On the other hand, here are two examples of the same procedural texture. They’re both of equal visual; quality, but two different resolutions. I had to render both images before I could really see the quality—the rendering engine, be it QuickTime, OpenGL, whatever, can do a final render based on bump map code (not a bumpmap image, not always a vector formula, but just “code”).



A fractal equation can often be part of a procedural texture, but a fractal texture is not the same as a procedural texture.

A bitmap has the advantage over procedural textures in that what you see at the correct resolution looks photographic, because often a bitmap is a photograph. And it’s limited to its original resolution.

A procedural texture is desired over a bitmap because it can be rendered at almost any resolution you specify. Because we almost always work in preview mode in 3d programs, procedural textures usually don’t look as good as a final render because all the calculations to make the thing look good are sacrificed for speed of work. The disadvantage to procedural textures is they almost never look as photorealistic as bitmap photos. There are, after all, a clever math equation written to file and/or to screen. The quality depends on the programmer’s skills—Pixar has had some brilliant people working with procedurals over the years, by the way.

My Best,

Gary

[KIR23]

You are absolutely right on all those things. The real practice although is that in gamedev at least all the textures are bitmaps. And working with pretty hi res images inside photoshop smart layers we can keep crisp result when scale things down and up but not bigger then source image. The same goes to Xara. I actually used this approach a lot in Xara before Photoshop got its smart layers. And it still works easier in Xara. It only needs a few extra conveniences. I think they should go a bit beyond their typical graphic/web design focus.

[Gare]

I think they should go a bit beyond their typical graphic/web design focus.

I've asked about this in a different thread in "Dear Xara...".

-g