With a single click you can transform your heading into a shape of your choice You can also choose whether it should be gloss or matt and the thickness of the outline.Īnother really cool feature, the Design Option, allows you to place your heading on a board, with or without holes, or to create buttons and border styles. You can also simply drag on the preview image when the cursor changes to this icon. You can make it shorter or you can make it longer. You will see that the image is instantly updated.Įxtrusion is the 3D depth of an object. Or adjust the hue by dragging on the color strip. This displays the color options dialog where you can adjust the shade of the color by dragging in the color box To change the color of a light simply double click it. This is as simple and as straightforward as it could be. You can see the lighting change on the text as you do this. The striped light controls the position of the shadow. In this case we have three colored lights shining from above, behind and the side of the text. Xara3D has three separate colored lights shining on the object, and you can see these by pressing the light bulb. You can create some really eye catching effects by adjusting the lighting. Of course, all the changes you make are immediately reflected in the preview image. You can apply most other effects on a per character basis in the same way, including animation. You can even alter the color of one letter at a time by clicking on the cursor icon, using the arrow and shift keys to select the letter and then adjusting the color options.

Select the element you wish to work with. As you can see you can select the whole heading, only the faces, only the sides, the background, individual lights or the shadow. This drop down menu allows you to choose which element of the image you would like to work on. This is really useful for web graphics where you might want a heading to blend perfectly into the web page background. You can also import a bitmap as a background. You can use imported texture bitmaps to color the text and this can give stunning results. You’re not limited to just using plain colors. In Color Options, you can alter the color or texture of the heading and the background.įor this tutorial we’re using a plain background with white text - the text appears colored on screen because we have colored lights shining on it, as we'll see shortly. The Option Bar can be used to set almost all the attributes of your heading and background but you can also use the buttons the toolbar to access each of the controls. Try selecting alternative fonts, and precisely controlling all the normal formatting options. You can just type or delete in the usual way. Find a balance with the Strength and and Smoothness settings that gives you a good displacement without over cooking the edges! See Figure 3 for my settings.To change the text click on the text icon ( )on the toolbar to open the editor. You will need to set the Scale % down low I had it all the way down to 10. The default settings will probably look nasty and again I encourage you to experiment with the settings. Click on the purple_agate.png thumbnail in the window that opens and it will be loaded and used to displace your image. (If you’ve not used the plugin before you may get an error message just click OK to dismiss it.) A Browse for Folder dialog will open up use it to navigate to the folder on your hard disk where you exported the desaturated purple_agate.png image. The first thing you need to do is select the displacement map you want to use by clicking the grey-scale default image on the right side panel. From the New menu on the InfoBar select Image Skill and then Displacement Map and the Displacement Map dialog opens. Make sure that all of your groups are selected and choose Live Effect tool again. This is because the plugin renders from the outside in, meaning it’s kind of like cooking pancakes, if your pan is too hot (or the extrusion too large) the outside is overdone and the inside is still doughy! Having text as separate extruded letters is necessary for the Displacement Map plugin to work properly.

Locking an effect helps speed your work because the program doesn’t have to render too many effects which slows things down. Once you are satisfied with your embossing, lock the effect by clicking the Lock/unlock Effects icon on the InfoBar. I rendered my embossing at 600 dpi and to produce a very fine image. One thing I discovered with the Emboss Live Effect is that you can use the drop down menu, Resolution of effect on the InfoBar and type any value there.

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