CompactDraw Advanced Bitmap Effects

Envelope Editing
You may realize in the previous chapters that the Bitmap can be distorted with the envelope the same way as a text.
Before you use the envelope first time you have to convert the Bitmap to envelope. To do that go to menu Bitmap and select Convert to Envelope or just select the shape tool and click on the Bitmap. You will be asked if you want to Convert it to envelope.

Note: In order to make a smooth effects you have to move the envelope inwards - making the result object smaller.

You can make a very interesting effects with the Bitmap on Envelope. However this takes some time to calculate and the results are not always smooth.

 

Make a Texture
CompactDraw uses a textures on the disk. There is enough quality textures with CompactDraw so you can design almost anything. However you can make your own texture and copy it to the directory Textures.
If you want to use a texture just for the project you can load a Bitmap and from menu Bitmap select Make a Texture.
This will create a temporary project-specific texture. From now on in this project you will see a new texture in the texture list box.
CompactDraw doesn't save textures to the *.idr file by default. However once you add a project-specific texture to the project, this project will always save also all used textures to *.idr project file. The project file would be much bigger in this case. There is also an option in general setting to allow/disallow saving of the textures.

Note: You can't add the objects with user textures to the Object library. The object would work only for the project with the texture defined.