WEBSITE AND WEBSITE GRAPHICS CREATED WITH XARA DESIGNER 6 PRO A couple of years ago I made an image of the Earth where the continents appeared to be painted in gold on a transparent blue globe. I called it the Hollow Earth. I had animated it, so that it would spin West to East as the real earth does, and you could see the continents foreshortening as they approached the edge of the globe, then watch the undersides of those continents reappear on the far side of the globe. It prompted a flurry of similar images by others in the Talkgraphics forum, based usually on flat images of the continents subjected to various forms of moulding to simulate the foreshortening as the globe rotated. However the foreshortening in my image followed entirely automatically from the fact that I had created my continents in Xara 3D, so that I had an actual three-dimensional model of the Earth or at least of its continents, to play with, and I could view the model from any angle. That first version was actually very crude, and it has since gone through several revisions, the most recent of which I turned into my avatar on the Talkgraphics forums. This article is an attempt to describe how I created the Hollow Earth (HE) and its animation. Unlike previous tutorials, I am not expecting anyone to actually try to follow all the necessary steps to make their own version, partly because it involves so many repetitious steps at several stages, you would need to be as obsessed as I was to want to make the attempt, and partly because you would need to find your own source material for the world map, as the one I used is copywrite to someone else. I don’t even remember where I found it.  So this will be more like a retrospective diary where I will describe each phase of building the image. When I had the idea to make the Hollow Earth (HE), I had been playing with 3d discs in Xara 3D, and discovered that I could create a sphere from them by taking a number of identical thin discs, say thirty-six, and by placing each disc on its own line, and reducing the line size to zero, all the discs would collapse into each other, so they would still look like I only had one disc. I applied a Swing animation to them, and selecting each disc one at a time, gave each a  specific swing angle. With thirty- six discs, I would start at 0° swing angle for the first disc, 10° for the second, and increase the angle by 10° for each subsequent disc. Running the animation makes the discs swing around the vertical axis, spreading them out around the equator of the globe. By pausing the animation on frame 2, the full globe appears. H    1    2    3    4    5    6    Download Zipped Tutorial