Advanced Features: Making a fancy flyer
In this tutorial, we will make an overloaded, cheesy design for a flyer for a (non-existant) club music party :) An event I always wanted to organize... maybe some day!
This tutorial assumes that you've already read the Quick start tutorial and are familiar with the basics of DTPBlender.
The background
Fire up DTPBlender, and click the "A6" size preset. Cheesy designs always have an in-your-face image as a background. Let me look up one for you.
Unlock the BACKGROUND layer, right-click the background, go to the material buttons, add a new texture, go to the texture buttons, choose "Image" as type, click "Load Image" and load sky2.jpg. Go to the editbuttons and set SubDiv level to 7.
To make the colors a bit cheesier, go back to the texture buttons and set R to 0.75, Brightness to 0.9 and Contrast to 2.0.
Now, let's put the name of this club party (I call it "Trance2Sky" :)) into the middle of the flyer, in a big, cheesy font, which I provide here (it's free):
DODG5.TTF.pfb.gz (be sure to gunzip first ;))
Add->DTP->Text, enter "Trance 2 Sky", scale and place it, and give it a new material (press single-user on the default one), and make it a fat blue.
Adding a gradient to an object
We also want a gradient, of course. Click on the texture dropdown, and choose "Vert Gradient":
Choose the second color of the gradient (purple by default) to be plain white (click on the purple).
Let's turn the gradient upside-down. Enter -1.00 into the "SizeY" field.
Press F12 to render.
Wait, something's odd. The gradient looks different than in the preview!
Getting a more accurate preview of gradients
Well, this is the same problem we have with images: Preview resolution of images, gradients and all more involved materials is quite coarse. Unfortunately, it's even worse for text/curve objects. What you see in the render is the correct gradient. The preview is just an approximation.
If you depend on the preview being almost exact, there's hope, though:
To get a more exact preview of texts or curves, convert them to a mesh using ALT-C (texts will first be converted to curves, then to a mesh when pressing ALT-C for the second time.
Of course, when doing this, you lose the ability to edit the text, so you should save a backup copy of your object, i.e., SHIFT-D, and then convert the copy to a mesh.
Note on duplication: When duplicating objects, the new object will always automatically be layered on top of the original object.
We now have something like this:
DTPBlender effects: Adding an outline to objects
Now, let's add a black outline to the text. This can be done with just a few clicks, and it's non-destructive! Go to the object buttons (F7), press "NEW Effect". Voila! There's your outline! "Sharp" and "Round" are slight variations of how the outline is computed, and with "Shadow", you can - guess what - add soft drop-shadows to objects, too!
Note: DTPBlender effects also work for images, even for images with an alpha channel (though this can get slow at high preview resolutions). Also, you can stack as many effects as you want on top of each other.
I set the size of the outline to 0.3, and left it at "Sharp".
Now, let's add a shadow on top of this. Press "NEW Effect" again, and adjust the settings until we have something like this:
Ever wondered what the Res: setting in the view header does?
The Res: setting in the view header lets you adjust the preview resolution of the whole scene. Negative values mean lower preview resolution, positive values mean higher preview resolution. This doesn't actually change anything in your objects' settings.
A subtitle
For the rest of the flyer, we will use a font called "Discognate" (also free), provided here:
discognate.pfb.gz (again, gunzip first)
Add->DTP->Text, place it so that it is aligned with the main logo on the left. Use snapping for this.
Note: DTPBlender has pretty smart snapping which will "automatically" insert "temporary" guides whenever it thinks that you want it - which you will notice when placing the new text object. A vertical guide will appear automatically, suggesting that you want to snap the new text to the already existing Trance2Sky logo, even though you don't touch it.
Well. Choose our font, single-user the material and make it white, and scale down the whole thing a bit.
Next, we would like the text to flush (use tracking) in order to be as wide as the logo (without scaling it to be huge). There are two approaches for this:
- Manually adjust the "Tracking" setting in the editbuttons until it fits (which used to be a pain, but is much more comfortable now that adjusting buttons updates the view in realtime)
- Another approach is to set the text to "Flush" (editbuttons), enter editmode, and then scale the textframe (CTRL-S) until it is as wide as desired.
OK, let's add a little outline too. This time, we will use a different approach for adding an outline:
DTPBlender also supports real outlines for curve/text objects. The effect we used above is a hack, which works for any kind of object, but can be pretty slow, and doesn't work for transparent objects. It works internally by just duplicating the object behind, in a certain pattern, and in a certain colour. It also can't use a real material.
So, to get a real outline which is actually a curve, just go to the editbuttons for our subtitle, and increase the "Outline" setting to, say, 0.05. Voila! This outline can even use a real material (so, for example, a gradient). The material index used for it can be set under the "Outline" setting.
There's one drawback though: Certain curve objects (especially cheap fonts) may have 'buggy' curves which can't be extrapolated correctly into an outline, so they will look messy. For those, you can of course still use the regular Outline Effect.
My view now looks like this:
Maybe add another piece of text above the logo. SHIFT-D the lower text, move it upwards, and change it a bit. Notice how the letters 'drop in' from right to left because it is set to "Flush".
I also changed the material for this one, and now it looks like this:
Working with groups
OK. I would like to insert something on the right, so we need to move the whole logo part a bit more to the left and scale it down.
But, before doing that, let's convert it into a group! Select the logo and the pieces of text above and below (use borderselect - just drag with the left mouse button), check that all 3 are selected by grabbing them, and then press CTRL-G.
Any collection of objects can be converted into a group. Groups can be manipulated like any other single object. They can also be appended from other files. All groups available in the current file can be added to a scene using SPACE->Add->Group.
To edit an existing group, enter group editmode by pressing SHIFT-TAB with the group selected. Pressing SHIFT-TAB again will exit group editmode.
Groups are edited in-place, which means that you can see what your edits look like in the context of your scene.
Groups can also have effects applied to them. A group's effects will then be applied to all group members individually. The "Fixed Z" option in the effect buttons can be helpful here.
A group's name can be changed in the buttonswindow header in the GR: field.
To ungroup a group, press CTRL-G and confirm the dialog.
When you duplicate a group (no matter if ALT-D or SHIFT-D), you will always create an instance, meaning that editing the group will always change all instances of it.
Interactive transform of fills/gradients/images
Now, scale the group down a bit and move it to the left, so we have about 20-30% of horizontal space on the right free for other stuff.
Imagine you want to put a small vertical strip of images on the right, showing various cut-out parts of a single photo you once made at a previous party. You do not need to cut your photo in pieces with an image editor - you can do all this inside DTPBlender.
Here's an example image:
Add->DTP->Image, place roughly at the top-right, switch to texture buttons and choose our party.jpg after clicking "Load Image".
Now, we want a portrait aspect for these images. To simply cut off the right half of the image without squeezing the image, turn off "AutoTexSpace" in the editbuttons, enter editmode (TAB), and drag the top-right and bottom-right vertices to the left until we have a portrait aspect ratio. Exit editmode. The image shouldn't be squeezed - it should just be missing the right half:
Now, to "zoom" into the image, you would normally change the SizeX/SizeY/SizeZ buttons in the material buttons. No need, we can just use DTPBlender's interactive texture space transform.
Press T, and choose Size. Scale the image up inside the frame until it shows only a smaller part of the whole photo.
Likewise, you can also use T->Grab to move around the portion shown.
Let's add a little outline around the image. Of course, we could do this using an outline Effect. But as the effect tries to correctly outline alpha channels, it is quite slow compared to a simple black rectangle, which is what we really want.
So, just do the following: Add->DTP->Box. Go to the editbuttons, set Outline to 0.2, and turn off "Fill".
Turn on snapping and move the box to the image so that the top-left corners snap. Enter editmode on the box, and move the right and lower side of it until they snap, too. Exit editmode.
If you didn't have the image selected when adding the box, the box might not have been layered on top of it. You can always press GZ and move the mouse around to check if the layering is correct.
Next, let's duplicate this image vertically until we end up with a few of them. Be sure to select both the image and the border object, and SHIFT-D, constrain to Y, and hold CTRL for relative snapping so we get equal distances.
Hmm. Now in this example, the distance between the images is a bit too large, so we get closer to the top border than to the bottom border. Of course, I'm only looking for a reason for re-aligning several objects to each other ;-). So, say we want all images to be aligned a bit tighter, but we want to keep the bottom-most image fixed as a reference.
No problem: Place the cursor at the bottom edge of the bottom-most image (just LEFTMOUSE-click there), select all images using borderselect, turn on "Translate only" in the view header, and then press S and then Y. Pretty easy :)
Now, let's choose a different portion of the overall image for each of the little images. Select each of the images, and press T and choose Grab in order to move the shown portion of the photo.
Suddenly decided that the pictures are too colourful, and you'd rather have them in black/white, or - maybe - black/cyan? No problem!
As they all share the same material, we can just edit it for all of them:
Go to the material buttons, set the output mode of the texture to "Mix" instead of "Mul", set it to "No RGB", make the basic colour of the material black (click on the left colour swatch), and the texture color cyan (the right purple color swatch).
Of course, by choosing other colors and making more use of the material system, you can achieve all kinds of really wicked effects which you would possibly never be able to achieve in other DTP applications. Just play around!
As a last piece of candy (I'm slowly getting tired), we can add a transparent vertical strip behind the images (look further below if you want to know what I mean :)).
Add->DTP->Box, place and edit so that it covers the images (and a bit beyond) horizontally, and the whole scene vertically. Layer (GZ) it behind the images. Make the material single-user, make its basic colour black, and adjust Alpha (the A slider) to 0.18.
Doesn't look that bad. Let's SHIFT-D this strip, rotate it (R), and put it beneith the "Trance 2 Sky" logo.
Here's the final render:
And here's the blend (assumes all files mentioned in this tutorial are in the same directory):