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Mould Mania

by Tony Roberts

The mould tool visited

Click the mould tool and view the infobar. Notice how everything is greyed out. If you now click an object several preset shapes become available, and if you previously copied a shape to the clip-board the paste icons will also. Click any of these icons to apply an envelope or perspective and so mould your object accordingly. If you try to paste from the clipboard and the contents are unsuitable Xara will tell you. Once you have applied an envelope all the other options become available. These apply to whatever mould is selected and (in order) allow you to

  • Add a distortion grid,
  • Remove the envelope/perspective (reverting back to the way the object was before the envelope was first applied),
  • Modify the envelope without the object following it,
  • Rotate the object within the envelope/perspective or
  • Copy the current envelope/perspective to the clip-board as a shape, replacing the contents there.

Default envelope under a microscope

Select a rectangle and the mould tool. Click the leftmost rectangle on the infobar labeled default envelope and notice that a new bounding box appears tightly around the object with four corner points highlighted.

Click the copy icon on the infobar to copy the envelope to the clipboard and paste it (Ctrl V) somewhere on your drawing. The result should be a rectangle. Click shape edit then the tab key, the bottom left point is selected. Tabbing 4 more times displays each point's handles in turn and brings you clockwise round to the start again, showing the four points are connected by curve segments with point handles equally spaced along the segment and in line such that the four sides appear straight. All envelopes are enclosed objects with four points, the connecting segments can be lines or curves.

Editing Envelopes

The further your shape is from the mould, the more edit facilities you have at your disposal. Xara have blocked some of the tools to prevent you doing something silly, but I think they have been over zealous and we'll create our envelopes unapplied to any object. You can use whichever you feel most comfortable with, but may find some tasks more difficult with less tools at your disposal. We shall also use the grid as this makes it easier to keep handles balanced.

With the Mould tool selected:

Points and handles can be dragged

With the Shape Editor tool selected, and an envelope applied:

 

All shape edit facilities except make line, make curve, add, subtract or break at points, reverse path, nudge points, smoothing

With the Shape Editor tool selected, and the envelope shape separate:

All shape edit facilities including make line, make curve, reverse path, nudge points, tabbing round. Obviously add, subtract or break at points or smoothing should not be used!

 

Using the clipboard

Once you have mastered sending mould envelopes to the clipboard and applying them it will become second nature. You will also be able to edit moulded objects as follows: 1. Copy its envelope to clipboard 2. paste it as a template 3. remove from the mould, edit the contents 4. reapply the envelope from the clipboard and stretch into the template.

But before we move on to create and edit mould envelope shapes there a few things to know.