This is driving me crazy! I made a couple of textures. One was a black dot on a green background, the other a pink flower on a yellow backround. Both were square and made to be tileable. I saved them as PNGs and went to import them into Animate Pro as textures in my color palette.
1. The only format I can add is PSD or TNG. So I had to go back and save them as PSDs.
So now I could add them to my palette. One problem down. The shapes I had wanted to have a texture were filled with a solid color, so I clicked on it and then selected the texture from the palette.
2. My whole computer choked and hung. After about 3 minutes it sluggishly revived. The texture was microscopic. So I tried to resize it but couldn’t. Aside from the computer bogging down, the resize controls were too small to manipluate. Mind you, the original PSD file was 14 KB
So I figured I’d better make a larger square filled with my texture–which I did and added to my palette. Yahoo, that worked. But when I tried to select a shape and then select the texture–my computer hung again.
So I came at it from another angle. I selected the paint bucket tool and then the texture. Now all I had to do was click on the shape with the paint bucket and it filled with my texture.
3. Problem. The fill is not consistent. If the shape is small the fill is small. If the shape is larger, the fill is larger. So I have to now resize the texture in each and every shape that I filled trying to get them more or less the same size. I wish you could copy the attributes of one filled shape and paste it to another–like a paste special option. But no, you have to tweak each one manually.
4. The other problem is if you have overlapping shapes the bucket will not fill the area covered by another shape. It will if you use the select shape, select texture route–but them my computer hangs. So I have to pull apart my drawing so there are no overlapping shapes and then fill with the bucket tool. Another hassle.
So am I doing something wrong or is there some easier way to do this? Maybe import the texture as an image and vectorize it. Then I can paste it where I need it to be and trim the edges.
Lily, you’re the best! Thanks! That helped a lot!
1. Yes, it’s TGA, not TNG.
2. I create all my vector art in Xara Designer Pro, export as PDF and import to TBAP. The shapes are already created filled with a flat color. After I posted this I closed TB and just now opened up my file and I can select and fill without hanging. So I don’t know what happened.
3. The store gradient feature works well. I just have to adjust sometimes as there is a seam showing. And the edit gradient works well for multiple selections. Thanks!
4. I have been using the Paint tool.
Thanks again for your quick reply! This really helps!
I hope these answers will be helpful…
1) PSD or TGA.
2) I wonder if the reason that it hung at this point was because the shape had already been painted. I haven’t experienced a hang like this before. I ran some tests on my end but was unable to come up with a hang. Did you create the shape with the brush tool or the pencil tool?
3) It does indeed scale the fill by default. However there are two ways that you can get around this problem.
1 - With your select tool, click on a painted texture area that you like the shape/orientation of. In the Tool Properties window, there’s a button for Store Colour Gradient (it looks like a kind of a blue box with a check mark on it). If you click this button it will store that orientation so that whenever you paint with a texture or a gradient from now on it will paint it that way.
Just remember now when you go back into your Paint Bucket, you need to enable the option to Use Stored Gradient.
2- Edit Gradient/Texture tool. There’s a really nice ability with the Edit Gradient/Texture tool to copy and paste a matrix from one painted element to another. Like let’s say that you’ve painted already a bunch of them with your texture pot, and they’re not lined up. With your Edit/Gradient texture tool, get one of them to look how you want. Then click on it to select it, and do a Ctrl+C. Now you can drag to select all of the gradients and do a Ctrl+V (always with the Edit Gradient texture tool). It will now paste the matrix into those other elements.
4) Which tool are you using? If you’re using the Paint Unpainted tool, then it will not paint an area which has already been painted. However if you use the Paint tool then when you drag it will repaint other areas that have already been painted.
Hope this helps!
~Lilly