NOTE: You will need Sean Sedwards' Spherical Mould plug-in filter installed. Refer to the document file included with the filter for installation instructions and terms and conditions.

To apply any plug-in filter effect, the bitmap must be selected.

One by one, select the square shapes, move them so they do not overlap another square shape, and from the Arrange menu, select Create Bitmap Copy. Set the color depth and resolution as shown top  left.

After you have converted all eight squares to bitmaps, select each bitmap and from the Plug-ins menu, select Mould > Spherical Mould. Using the sliders set the Mapping to 100 and the Distortion to 50. Press OK to apply the fisheye effect. Repeat this for all eight bitmaps.

ANOTHER NOTE: Even though the final image will be 96 dpi (Windows screen resolution), using 300 dpi for our bitmap will produce a cleaner image. When we export the animation Xara will automatically reduce the resolution to 96 dpi.