Xara3D Tutorial

Welcome to Xara3D, a fast and powerful program for producing high quality 3D headings, titles, logos and buttons for use on the Web and other on-screen presentations.

We describe Xara3D as 'slimware' because we have deliberately avoided providing dozens of controls and dialog boxes. Xara3D is intended to do one job only, namely to produce great 3D graphics, and to do that job supremely well. It can create GIFs, animated GIFs, JPEGs, PNGs, BMP files and AVI movies in seconds rather than the usual minutes or even hours that a more complex 3D program would take.

An introduction to Xara3D

This short tutorial will show you how easy it is to produce quality animated and static 3D graphics in seconds. We're going to use a text heading, but you can just as easily create 3D graphics from imported 2D shapes.

The first stage might typically be to adjust the position and angle of the heading, which is simply a matter of dragging with the mouse over the heading. You can position it in 3 dimensions in real-time. This freeform dragging allows you to view and position the heading at any angle.

To change the text you simply start typing. To add a second line, just press Return.

Now you will probably want to alter the appearance of your graphic. The buttons along the top toolbar control the main operations of Xara3D.

So for instance to change the text attributes, just click the T button to open the text dialog.

You can use this dialog box for fast text editing, for example changing the text size and alignment. You can change the font by selecting from any TrueType fonts installed on your computer (and there's over 50 fonts included on the Xara3D CD) and if you click 'More' the full character set is displayed.

When you close the dialog box you can see the change.

You can also of course alter the color or texture of the heading and the background. Select the color dialog by clicking the color palette button (or just right click over the image). This displays the color picker where you can adjust the shade of the color by dragging within the color box, or adjust the hue by dragging on the color strip at the bottom. The image is instantly updated.

The drop down at the top of the color dialog allows you to select which bit of the image you want to change - the front, just the sides, the background etc.

You can even alter the color of one letter at a time by simply selecting the letter you want to change - click the I button and then position the cursor using the arrow keys, shift and arrow select a character. Note that most other attributes can be applied on a per character basis in the same way.

But you're not limited to just using plain colors. You can use imported texture bitmaps to color the text or background and this can give stunning results. Select the texture dialog by clicking X (or just right click over the image) select text or background from the drop down and click load texture.

What's more you can alter the angle and resolution of the textures, and position images exactly against the background from within the texture dialog.

You're not limited to plain-edged text - you can choose from more than 20 different bevel edges. Press the B button to open the bevel dialog.

My original image had a round incut bevel with a bevel depth of 100, but I'll change that to round cornered, depth 10.

The next stage might typically be to adjust the extrude depth, which you can do by pressing the E button.

You can make it shorter or longer, the original image had a depth of 10, let's change that to 100.

When you're using the program you'll notice that it sometimes waits a second before drawing the highest quality image - this is the Xara3D anti-aliasing working, which causes the image to be rendered at high quality, fully anti-aliased after a second. Using traditional ray-tracing to anti-alias an image in other 3D programs would typically take many minutes, so you can see that Xara3D is also lightning fast.

To create an impression of depth, of floating above the page, you can give the heading a shadow. First step is to open the Shadow dialog box. Click the 'S' button.

Then check Shadow. You can make the shadow more or less transparent, depending on the effect you want to create. Notice that even with the shadow, Xara3D is still incredibly fast, when many packages would have slowed to a snail's pace.

You can also blur the shadow and even change its color to create some great effects like this halo.

I'm going to revert back to the starting image to show you another powerful Xara3D feature - how to alter the animation controls.

We've kept the animation controls simple but the results can be impressive. You select the options you want from the Animation dialog, click the A button.

Xara3D produces absolutely smooth animations, and you can even continue to adjust the angle while it's rotating.

The animation controls couldn't be simpler - you can alter the animation speed, number of steps per revolution, the direction, the number of loops and you can pause the first frame. You can also rotate the text and the lights. There's eight animation types to choose from - such as swing, pulsate, fade and step.

What's more you can have multi-page animations, which run through a sequence of different images. Simply type your sequence into the text dialog divided by Ctrl Enter and then select your animation style, in this case rotate.

To preview the animation you simply select the animate button...

... and then save your heading as an AVI movie or animated GIF for use straight away on a web page.

Next I'll show you how to create some really eye catching highlight and color effects by adjusting the lighting. Xara3D has three separate colored lights shining on the object, and you can see these by pressing the light bulb button.

In this case we have three colored lights shining on the text. The striped light controls the position of the shadow. To alter the light angles simply drag the arrows on-screen. You can see the lighting change on the text as you do this. To change the color of a light simply double click it, which displays the color picker again, and select the light from the drop down.

Finally I'll show you one last really cool feature, the 3D button shape tool.

At the click of a button you can create an instant 3D button, in a shape of your choice - tick the U shaped button on the toolbar and then select the shape of the button from the drop down.

The button will take the attributes of your current heading, but of course you can alter the bevel and extrude, the color and wording using the normal tools. This is one of the many pre-set button shapes but you could just as easily use an imported shape of your own.