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You are not limited to shapes you create in your vector program. For example, Corel Draw ships with thousands of pieces of clipart that are eligible for importing into PhotoImpact. The four pieces above were simply imported into Draw and then exported as .AI files before using the methods discussed in Part 1. If you are really adventurous, you can even scan an object or drawing into your favorite photo software and then convert the bitmap into a vector (I used Corel Trace in the next example). In fact, why limit yourself to using one shape to make an object? Let's use two. If you want
to play along while reading, download these two .AI files. First open a new document in PhotoImpact, 500 x 500 pixels and, for now, give it a white background. Before you import the shape, make sure the color on the Attribute bar is any thing but white, and for the sake of speed set the mode to 2D Object. Import the Ornament-2 .AI file into your Custom Shape dialog box and click OK. Click and drag a rectangle that fills about two-thirds of the document. Now, we'll resize the new object manually. Right-click on the object and choose the last menu item, Object Properties (or shortcut CTRL+SHFT+ENTER). Click the Position and Size tab and check the Keep aspect ration box, if it isn't already checked. Enter 400 in either the width or height box, then click OK. Now import the Ornament-2 Inverse shape, but before you click and drag, change the color on the Attribute bar, so you can differentiate between the two objects. Draw your rectangle shape so that it covers most of the first object. Again, we'll manually resize, so the size is not critical. After you've drawn object number 2 use the Object Properties dialog just as before, but this time change the width to 375. This shape is not a perfect square, so only change the width. Open the Easy Palette. Click on the third from left tab at the top to open the Layer Manager. Here you see your two objects stacked, one on top of the other. Click on either object, then hold Shift and click the other so that both are highlighted and selected. Still in the Layer Manager, right-click either of the objects and choose Align, then Center Both. It probably won't be exactly aligned, but that's OK. Adding some Material Presets should hide any flaws. Before you leave the Layer Manager, click on the top object to select it. Click on the leftmost button at the top of the Easy Palette to open up the Galleries. Click the + next to Material Gallery, and when it opens select the Metallic tab. Double- click on Copper 2. Change the settings on the Attribute bar to 3D Object, Border-7 and Depth-15. Now select the other object. For this one choose Plastic, Red-1, and the same Attribute settings as the first object. You can always play around with different Materials for each object, until you find a combination that pleases you. If you want to have some more fun, we can now merge the objects, resize them to a smaller scale, make five or six duplicates, change their Hue and Saturation, and create your own custom Stamp. If you want, go to Part 3. Home | Gallery | Tutorials | Free Stuff
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