On the previous page I showed you some of Xara3d's capabilities in creating animated gifs. On the page before that I introduced some of the program's more basic - yet very impressive capabilities. On this page I'll introduce you the program's most advanced feature. If the program could only do what was shown on the first page, at the price Xara Ltd. charges it would be a bargin. Add to that the great animation features and the price is a steal. Throw in the capability you'll find on this page and Xara3d seems rediculously underpriced.

And you don't just have to take my word for it. At the bottom of this page I have information on how you can get a free time-limited trial copy of the Xara3d. It will give you the opportunity to experience the program's ease of use, its flexibility, and its overall quality. I know then you'll agree with me that Xara3d is one of the rarest things in computing - a great program at a great price.

Let's get right to Xara3d's most advanced feature...

Xara3d can import shapes so you aren't restricted to font-based graphics. That may not sound like much of a feature but I assure you it gives you incredible creative freedom.

Start to stop this spinning sign took me just five minutes! I quickly drew the sign in Xara X (an illustration program) and exported it as sign.gif ; I also saved the octogon shape in Xara X's .web file format. Xara3d opened that .web file and it was then just a simple matter of applying sign.gif as the fill to the octogon shape. I reduced the extrusion depth to one pixel so the sign would appear thin. I quickly adjusted the shadow location and turned on the animation. Easy.

This example shows how Xara3d can be used to create soft drop shadows for a complex shape. It is much easier to master such effects in Xara3d than using an expensive program like Adobe Photoshop. This was basically made the same way as the sign above except I didn't draw the car - it came from Xara's online clipart collection available to users of Xara X.

This example features my five-year old son David. In Xara3d I, in effect, applied his picture to a shape. Just as with font-based shapes, I was able to adjust the extrusion depth, edge bevel profile, shadow attributes, lighting position and color, as well as its animation attributes. Once you have a shape you like it is a simple exercise to make a series of graphics by changing only the bitmap fill. To modify this one with another picture would take less than a minute.

Put your cursor over David to see what happens. For the "rollover" image I simply changed the color of the shadow in Xara3d. The image swap is done with javascript.

This one also has a javascripted rollover effect. Both graphics are basically the same - the difference being the animation settings used in Xara3d. Getting the white border on the letters was achieved in this case by importing to Xara3d the outline shape as a standard windows metafile ( .wmf ). That shape was then filled with a bitmap that has the black and red letters.

I designed this logo for a client a while back - it was a 2d black and white logo I created in Xara X . Creating this 3d example in Xara3d was relatively easy - but it did take a bit of playing with it. I had fun and I learned how to accomplish the effect. I find the best programs really facilitate playful learning - as Xara3d does so well.

Xara3d's ability to import shapes allows it to work hand in hand with other graphics programs that can produce windows metafiles ( .wmf ) or enhanced metafiles ( .emf ). It works flawlessly with Xara X - it will in fact open Xara X's native files directly, automatically translating them to outline shapes that can then be manipulated in Xara3d.