Written By J.L. White |
|
While talking with Leo Martin the other day, I mentioned to him how much fun I was having using Aura. He said Xara? I said no, the new Newtek product Aura. Then I asked, "What the heck is Xara"? He told me it was a new 3D text program designed for Web use. I took a look and was quite impressed. This little program does not do a lot, but what it does, it does VERY well! Xara 3D is used to create 3D text for use with Web page design, but can also be of benefit to Aura users for video. Xara 3D by Xara Ltd. is by far, the easiest 3D program I have ever seen. Just type in the text you want, select which font to use, pick a color and you're done! It's that simple. The new 3.0 version has added a lot of goodies to make it even more powerful. It is hard to believe that this program only sells for $39.95. That's right, 40 bucks and it comes with a CD full of examples, textures and fonts. It will use any True Type font you have on your system and any image (bmp, gif, jpg or png format) can be used as a texture. You can download a demo version at Xara's Home Page. Everything works but when you save the image out , it has demo written all over it, but you can get the feel of how easy it is, and even order it on line, where you get an ID number to remove the demo part. Well worth it... So how can this help me in Aura you ask? Well Xara 3D can save out BMP, GIF, GIF Animations, JPG, or PNG with 32 bit. All can be loaded directly into Aura and PNG has an alpha channel that works correctly with Aura, so you can have full color 3D Titles to use in your Videos. Very cool stuff.  The window below is where you type in your text. You can type in as many as 16 lines of text. It will resize as it goes. All the text is based on the size of the Xara 3D window. When you stretch the window, so does the text. You can select a certain point size if you wish. Starting with version 3.0, you can also load in EMF or WMF files, so if you have a program like Corel, you can create a logo, then load it into Xara 3D and it will treat it just like a font. They also have special plug-ins just for Corel, maybe one day they will have one for Aura or Photoshop, then we can use it directly in Aura.  This is the bevel options. As you can see, you have a wide range of selections to choose from and depending on the font you choose and other options, you will never run out of styles to use.  This is the extrude window. By mixing the depth and the outline width, you can pull off some really interesting effects.  This shows you what the light sources look like. You have 3 lights to control and all you do is click on the arrow and move. You see the results in real time in the main window. You can choose any color to use for the lights as well.
In 3.0, they added the option to add drop shadows. With the alpha channel, you can load this right into Aura with the drop shadow already in there. The text can be any color or you can use a texture. One of the coolest things about Xara 3D, is that you can add a sample background color or texture and the program with dither to match the background. This is extremely usefull for web page design, when you use a texture for your background page. This way the text and shadow always look correct.  The texture window lets you load in any image to wrap on the text. You now have options to position and scale the image as you see fit. I spent WAY TOO MUCH time with this. You can get sooo many different looks by playing with these values. The program comes with a number of textures, but you can roll your own as well.  Last but not least, you have animation options for the text. This is basically for web use, but you could save out an animated GIF and load it into Aura, you are just going to be limited to 256 colors though. Depending on what it is, that might be just fine. This basically just rotates the text but hopefully in future versions, they will expand on this powerful option  Below is a sample pic of Aura with the logo loaded in from Xara 3D. Do yourself a favor and try out this product. You won't be sorry you did...
Back To The Table Of Contents
|
