September 2014 Tips and Tricks - Creating illustrations With Only Extrudes

[Gare]

This is where I'd take your experiment, csehz, and you might even discover you have a better way, or a better technique than I used in all of 5 minutes!

1. You're already at Step 1 in this illustration below. Thew angle of rotation on the two objects will cause a slight problem later, but I'll show you how to fix it. See, both sides, left and right, of the lens need to touch the reflection, or you run into a perspective error the way I'm going to do this.

2. select the reflection object, and then press Ctrl+Shift+C to make a bitmap copy, with alpha, click Create. Delete the source vector group of shapes, and then position the bitmap copy where the vector group was. With the Photo Enhance tool, go up to the Infobar and blur the hell out of the bitmap.

3. Create a trapezoid, which suggests this plane is viewed with a vanishing point. Put the bitmap blurred copy on top of the trapezoid. With the Transparency tool, drag straight down so the reflection is reduced at the farthest point light has to travel to display a reflection. Play with the linear transparency values up on the Infobar.

4. Finally, this is going to clip the blurry bitmap, so your solution at the very beginning is to clip the group of objects to a larger rectangle with no outline and no fill so there is some room for this distortion, and the edges og the distorted bitmap will not be clipped, truncated. First, take the original lens and rotate it so its long side is nearly parallel to the bottom of the page.
Select the blurry bitmap, and then click it to put it into skew/rotate mode, and then skew the right side up until it meets the right side of the original illustration Rik did. You might also want to skew the blurry copy from left to a little to the right.

I'm sorry, your time's up! Actually, my time is up . It might be better to use the freeform perspective Mould tool on the reflection to get it exactly as you want, but this is real close to a believable reflection on a surface.




Does that work for you?

Xara file is attached, same as the screen snag posted here.

My Best,

Gary