I've been using Xara Photo and Graphic designer for about a week now to design some characters for a game I'm working on and in general find it great to use as a freehand authoring tool.
In order to develop a cartoon style, I'm building my characters out of free hand coloured objects with black outlines with cel shading made from partial masked clones of the objects. This works a treat until I come to put two of the objects together and want to erase part of the outline on the topmost object where it meets the underlying one.
I thought I'd found a solution with a tip on the Xara site (at the top of the page here) where you draw the outline portion you want and combine with a second object then break the objects again. This pretty much achieves what I want, I get a filled object with the outline broken where I originally left it, however, things start to go wrong when you attempt to mask clone a part of the object you've created (for example, to produce a shaded portion of the underlying object) as it's still a line and not a shape, so the mask clone gets confused and doesn't cut out the intended area.
This must be a pretty regular requirement, particularly for people creating flash animations, so I'm sure I must be missing something or going about the construction of the image in the wrong way.
When I add an outline to a shape, it always seems to build itself from the center of the line. Can I set my outline (line as opposed to fill) to be outside, middle, or inside my shape?
when I use the shape tool and text tool I'm getting a red dotted outline instead of the usual black outline. If I draw a rectangle it's empty, instead of shaded in? How do I put things back to normal?
I'm working with CorelDraw X3 and want to fill text into a round shape, while keeping it's exact outline. Hence, cutting of parts of words and letters is fine with me as long as the shape is well-defined. Unfortunately when filling paragraph text into a shape, the automatic line breaks lead to a quite irregular shape regardless of font size.
As workaround I arranged a mask in front of background and text but this requires a square paragraph text which is larger than the background. Since paragraph text obviously cannot be cropped with other objects I made the mask size bigger and filled it white. When exporting my document as image everything looks neat, but there must be a better way to do this in CorelDraw itself?
I tried converting the paragraph text into artistic text and cropping this, which works fine for a few words and a small object. But I'm talking around 1000 words here, and trying to crop this artistic text leads to very random cropping results. I guess such a large number of objects and knots is too much for CorelDraw to handle!?
Suddenly I'm having problems with the Arrange/combine/slice feature.
When I attempt to slice off a piece of an image, another straight cut occurs somewhere else on the image.
On the attached sample, I drew a wavy line like the one shown across the right arm of girl in the image and along with the expected slice was the vertical slice through the image. I backed up and started again, and the exact same vertical slice occurred.
This happens frequently, the unwanted slice is always straight , but sometimes horizontal, and sometimes angled. I'm using Wacom Cintiq tablet.
I'm having the same problem with my trial 7 version. I've been 'slicing' since Xara was a puppy.
I just read the thread the thread "...plus ask about erasers" but it doesn't answer my question about combining shapes to remove unwanted portions - or at least I didn't quite understand it. Here's my issue. I've created a nice "background" image with ripples and live effects, but it has gaps, and isn'tthe right shape. I need to erase parts of it and clip it to the right shape, but every time I try to do this using the slice tool, it puts the gaps back into the image! Attached is my image and the shape I want to clip it to.
I just tried converting the ripple shape to a bitmap copy and then slicing the shape - that doesn't get me the rippled effect I want - just the shape I already have. Then, I tried just creating the water ripples in my shape - but again that leaves gaps and when I try to "slice" them away it does all kinds of weird things to the shape..
I am trying to put a rounded rectangle around some text but it only makes a filled shape and covers the text. How do I put just the border of a rounded rectangle around some text?
I'm new to illustrator and I'm trying to achieve something I hoped would be quite simple. I want to take a bitmap, live trace it, then create an outline of 2px wide only around the outside limits of the shape. I want to then get rid of all of the live trace vectors and be left with my very simple outline of the original image. Eg.
I've tried image expand, I've tried outline, but nothing seems to work as I need it to.
i created three circles which overlap at certain points, and each of the spaces is filled in with a different color. i need to hide the thin, black outline of the circles. i have made sure that there is no stroke, but it's still there.
I manually trace around a large, not to simple, shape, hoping my outline will be a closed shape, but sometimes it's not. I assume there's an unintentional break in it somewhere. How can I find the break and fix it without doing the trace again?
I need to cut out some fish for patterns for the kids to make pottery ones - is there a way to make an outline of the fish withont having to take the time to use the eraser tool or to make just the whole fish black without the whole picture being a black box?
I'm struggling to do the most simple thing - draw a circle outline. In PSE, all you have to do is hit the circle marquee button, then use Stroke. But how the heck do you do it in Xara?
I'm trying to slice an image using the filter-web-slice function but I was wondering if there is a way to customize the function or change its properties in the Python-Fu. I need gimp to slice by columns (start in the top left corner slice each grid down the column then proceed to the next column. Right now all I can get gimp to do is cut by rows. Normally gimps function would be fine but I need the image labeled a particular way so I can use the individual files in a map for a game. I'm making a 118 images so renaming them by hand would take too long.
I'm creating navigational elements in photoshop and I want to be able to adjust the outline by itself, as well as there are some elements that are only an outline with no fill. How do I create shape outlines without the fill?
I have some artistic text, that I converted to curves. This artistic text, included outline which I would like to keep with the text. But now - I would like to apply a fill, to fill the entire creation, including the outlines, seamlessly. Basically, replace the outline color with the fill, and the fill itself - such as linear fountain fill.
I'm creating an image using characters from known brand, and I have to match the colors exactly. In Photoshop Elements, I can use the Color Picker to obtain colors directly from an image online. I'm not sure I can do that with Xara. But Elements doesn't have a vector pen, which Xara does, so what I'd like to do is outline my images using Xara and color them in with Elements.
Can I do that? Will there be any "technical difficulties"?
How do I draw an stroke/line around an rectangle shape and let it be "INSIDE of the rectangle". Like in Photoshop in the stroke layer effects.
What I have so far: I am aware of the "line" option. BUT it paints the stroke OUTSIDE of the rectangle and extends its size. This is NOT what I would like to have.
I have Designer Pro 7. Is there a way to get the outline of an object to take on the graduated fill transparency of an object? The line goes transparent with the object's fill when a linear transparency is applied, but remains opaque with a graduated one. I understand that I could turn the outline into an object and then apply the transparency but if I have to edit the object later, I would have to repeat the process.
how a png image sometimes has a checkerboard background instead of a dull white square background?Those png's are cool to import into Xara and have a smooth outline.
why is it when i EXPORT a png with the checkerboard background the outline looks like an 8 bit nintendo outline when placed on a website? These type of pngs with the checkerboard background are meant to be viewed as having no background...which actually works for me but the outline looks horrible.
what do i need to do to fix that outline issue? Is there some sort of setting that i have to tweak?
I have used Xara designer for years as its generally easier to use, but still can't work out hot to easily create the Outline Path and the pathfnder merge shapes function as in Illustrator. The idea is to have a block of text with an outline round the outside of the whole text, but separated from the text characters.
In illustrator the sequence is:
Write text and select then create outlines
Then Object, Path, Outline Path.
Then using the pathfinder utility, merge the outlines into one.
In Xara Designer, I can change text to shapes, but not generate an outline other than a line that hugs each character.
I need to make a DXF file for a newly aquired water jet machine here at work. It needsto be a polyline. How can I get the unextruded outline of the shape from my sketchm and convert to polyline and save as dxf?