We round off this series on Satori with a short exercise that draws on some of the techniques explored in recent months. It is an advertising poster for Body Works, a fictitious gymnasium where wannabe Jets and Schwarzeneggers try to turn themselves into Gladiator and Terminator lookalikes (see page 311).

The main graphic was produced with Fractal Design Poser 1 which appeared on issue 136’s SuperCD. I’d been impressed by a couple of pieces of artwork I had seen recently where part of a drawing is solid and the rest is shown as a wire frame, with a faded transition between the two. For example, one if the Satori sample files shows a solid train coming out of an easel, where it originates as a line drawing – you can see it on the cover of issue 134’s SuperCD.

Poser can’t produce composite wire-frame/rendered images, but Satori makes light work of it. I set up a suitable pose (it’s in the Poser file MainFig.POZ) and displayed it as a wire frame. I grabbed the screen, rendered the figure, and grabbed that too.

Next, I loaded the grabs into Graphic Workshop (Paintshop Pro and other editors would have done just as well) and cropped them close to the figure, removing extraneous screen furniture. I made sure that both crops were exactly the same size and that both had the same origin. The grabs were saved as TIFFs – FIGUREO.TIF on the SuperCD.

The plan was to load the pictures as separate layers in a single Satori canvas file. By superimposing one directly on top of the other, I would then paint in masking mode over the uppermost layer. The other grab would show through wherever I made brushstrokes. Mistakes and over-painting could be rectified by either removing the stroke from the object list and trying again, or painting over in unmask mode.

Although this is the painting process I used, it was done in a separate file (MainFigure.CVS). It makes sense to do this and render the end product as MainFigure.RIR which is then imported into the poster. A single import makes it far easier to move the graph around because we don’t have to move two bitmaps and keep them in exactly the same place. Also, only having to work with one bitmap improves Satori’s performance.

If I decide to edit the figure, I can always go back to the original file and re-render it. Before import into MainFigure.CVS, both TIFF files were converted to Satori’s proprietary RIR format.

Once I was happy with my body, I set up POSTER.CVS to begin the main design work. A blank canvas was created at A4 size with a white background. You can choose A4 by clicking the Inches radio button in the Picture Properties dialog, which appears when you elect to create a new file.

The dots per inch setting would be matched to the intended print medium. Since I don’t have a particular use in mind, my setting was changed to 75dpi. This is sufficient for draft output of a colour picture to 600dpi LaserJet printer – remember that a pattern of several printer pixels represents a shade of grey for one screen pixel.

Outputting at 600dpi would be slow, generate a huge file, and would not give better results than lower resolutions. You need to experiment to find the best draft and quality resolutions for your own printer. Satori enables you to change the DPI value at any time, so you can alter it to give an optimum combination of file size and resolution for different media.

A HEAD CASE
When loaded to layer, the bitmap containing the main figure wasn’t the right size. I couldn’t find a way to quickly and accurately scale the polygon containing the picture. It’s true that you can select the picture for editing and drag its corner handles. But you can only drag them one at a time, and it’s hard to achieve an accurately scaled shape.

A way round this is to not import the graphic via Load to Layer on the File menu. Instead, select the rectangle tool in the Geometry section. On the Mapping tab click on Use Mapping and choose the file to be imported. Click on Keep Aspect. This will force the rectangle to fit the proportions of the file being mapped into it, avoiding distortion. Finally, draw a rectangle. As you adjust its size you will find that the picture scales to fit, and the dimensions are constrained to maintain its aspect ratio.

Don’t forget to de-select the options before drawing another geometric shape, or it too will have the picture mapped onto it.

MAKING THE LOGO

The Body Works logo was designed on a separate file, LOGO.CVS. It’s a simple affair, being white text inclined on a red star. Red is a dynamic colour, the star suggests excellence and, being five-pointed, it reminds you of a jumping human shape. The overall effect is bold, clean, modern, direct, active and upbeat – just the image the gym wants to present.

The font within the star, Humanist 521 Extra Bold, was chosen from the long list installed on my machine. The lack of serifs makes it look modern and direct. The letters have a uniformly thickened fuss-free appearance, giving the impact required for a logo which is also in keeping with the image the gym wants to present.

A different font, VAGRounded Bt, was chosen for ‘gym’ because Humanist didn’t look right at this size. The substitute font fulfils similar criteria, however.

If you load LOGO.CVS on your machine and you don’t have either of these fonts, its appearance is unpredictable. Substitute your own fonts, it you like. The same applies to the other text used in the poster.

I mention these design decisions because although the SuperCD regularly puts professional-standard tools at your disposal, they don’t turn you into a good graphic designer. Design isn’t some mysterious combination of inspiration and whimsy. There is a logic to it which fulfils a set of goals.

To be able to do that takes practice and/or training. Faced with a design task like this, so many amateurs would come up with something which they couldn’t justify in any other way than ‘I think it looks nice’, right down to an entirely inappropriate old English style font. Yuck.

I don’t claim to be a designer or even that this poster is a particularly good example, but it’s a reasonable stab and there is method behind the making of it. You need to cultivate the same way of thinking.

Anyway, the one slightly tricky thing about drawing this logo is rotating the text. Although ordinary geometric objects can be rotated, the Rotate button greys out when you’re working on text. The way round this is to put the text on a layer of its own then go to the Layer tool palette. Here you will find a Rotate button on the Transformations tab. Press it, and a grid appears on the editing window. You can grab the grid and twist it round. When you have the required angle, tight-click and select Apply Settings. If you just select some other program control the rotation will not be applied. A more precise way to set the rotation is to right-click and select Set Values. Here you can type in the number of degrees you want.

The right-click menu also has a Reset option so you can abort changes. That doesn’t apply to rotations you’ve already applied, though. If you want to get rid of those, bring up the object list and delete the transformation action you find there.

I started this canvas at 800x600, but as work progressed I found myself running out of road on the right-hand side. Fortunately it is easy to resize a file. In the Canvas section of the toolbox is a Change Size button through which you can enter new dimensions.

When I’d finished, I found there was a lot of space around the logo which I wanted to crop off. I rid myself of this with the Define Crop tool, also in the Canvas section. This enables you to crop the picture in a way that can be revised later if you want to. The logo file was saved in RIR format, and saving only the cropped area is another option when you do that.

Back in the poster file, the logo was loaded. Once again, loading to layer caused problems with scaling so it proved better to draw a rectangle and map the logo file into it, using Keep Aspect to ensure that the image wasn’t distorted.

Incidentally, one glitch I encountered when re-positioning the logo was that after clicking Finish Edit the original did not always disappear. The object had been moved, but Satori wasn’t updating the display properly. If this happens to you, select the object for editing once again and click on one of the four buttons above Finish Edit that adjust the object’s depth in the current layer. When you finish editing Satori will do a more thorough display update, correcting the problem.

It is best to convert large files to RIR format for importing into Satori. I encountered a problem converting LOGO.CVS and other files to RIR. Satori always aborted when asked to do it via the File menu, or when it prompted me to convert when trying to import the CVS file. The way round this is to load the CVS from File, Open, then export it on RIR format via File, Save As. Select RIR from the drop-down list and be sure you add .RIR to the filename.

A SHADY BACKGROUND

The next problems to be solved were to get the head of the figure to overlay the heading text, and to deal with the black background to the rectangle containing the figure. A good solution seemed to be extended the black to fill the right-hand side of the poster, and to fade it in at the boundary between black and white.

Accordingly I drew a large black rectangle on the white background layer. I then overlaid the left-hand edge of this rectangle with another, this time with a box corner file style which goes from white in to the two left-hand corners to black on the right-hand side.

I wanted to ensure that these rectangles go right up to the edge of the image without leaving gaps at the margins. So after selecting the Rectangle tool I maximised the image window and collapsed the toolbox by clicking on the already depressed Geometry button. This revealed the image set on a crosshatched background which you can think of as the drawing board.

It’s possible to draw objects that extend on to the board. They are only rendered within the confines of the picture, but you’re guaranteed to have them go right up to the edge.

The easiest way to put the head in front of the text is to have the text layer in front of the figure, zoom in so that the head area fills the screen, and use a solid brush in mask mode to paint over unwanted text. It isn’t hard to get an accurate cut. Remember that unmask mode enables you to rectify over-painting.

A BLANK LOOK

At this point the poster is suitable for printing out as blanks on to which messages can be hand-written in the white area. The proprietor might also want to use it as the basis of an advert in a local magazine or for bill-posting. If additional text is placed on a layer of its own, this can easily be made visible or invisible using the associated light-bulb icon in the layer list.

In this way you could build up a series of layers, each with its own message, which together form a record of everything that’s been done with the poster. Only selected layers will be made visible, which means that from one file you can quickly reprint old posters or mix and match existing elements to make new ones.

I’ve added one such layer called Optional Text. It’s a set of bullet points detailing a promotional offer. Each bullet is a miniature version of the logo star, drawn in outline (width set to two in the Parameters tab) using a darker version of the green in the main figure. I copied this using the eyedropper tool and then wound down the value in the green channel on the Slider tab of the colour palette.

To trace the logo star, zoom in on it, then draw thin lines from two inner nodes to opposite points. The lines intersected at the star’s centre, giving the starting point for a new star drawn with the Regular Polygon tool. Drawing the new star within the existing one made it easy to get the same proportions. I then deleted the construction lines and dragged the new star to its final position.

The idea was to then turn on Snap to Grid and make copies of the star at regular intervals in a vertical line. But somehow I couldn’t get this to work, even though I’d earlier had some success with grids. So, instead, when I’d made a copy of the star and with it selected for editing, I right-clicked and chose Move Parameters.

The choice of green outline, by the way, is in accordance with a simple rule of thumb you can follow to make your designs look better. Choose a small palette of colours, design elements and fonts, and stick with it. The outline stars pick up the wire-frame element of the picture and are also miniature version of the logo. The picture reflects red, white and blue from other design elements. And so everything ties together quite neatly.

It also helps if you link elements by alignment and other visual cues. People will tend to follow the gaze of the figure, for example, and their eyes will be drawn to the message on the left. The column of stars draws the eye down to the logo.

This isn’t everything you need to know about successful design, of course, but if you apply these ideas it is much easier to come up with elegant results.

Red and blue prose

The only point of interest about the heading is the way I made some of it blue. Satori can’t change colours part-way through a text string. Your first thought might be to treat different colours as separate text objects – ‘SHAPE’ would be one, ‘UP’ would be another, and the exclamation mark would be a third. All well and good, but it’s a fiddly job to position them accurately in relation to each other.

I entered ‘SHAPE UP!’ as a single text object coloured red. Then I drew a rectangle over the ‘UP’ part, having first pressed the Tint button on its Effects tab and coloured the adjacent box blue. This was taken from a highlight on the right-hand side of the rendered figure using the eyedropper tool.

The idea is that the red and blue in the figure are reflections of the colours in the heading, making the text appear to be lit from within and also helping to bind together words and picture.

Text, rectangle and logo were placed on a layer of their own to make it easy to manipulate them independently of other picture elements.

Outputting Your Graphics

When you’re ready to save a picture for use in other software, go to File, Save As and select a common bitmap format such as TIFF (Tagged Image File Format). This can then be imported into another program for printing – note that Satori 1.63 is unable to commit pixels to paper.

I mentioned last month that when you select any of the other formats listed in the Save dialog, Satori still generates a CVS file unless you type the appropriate extension on to the end of the filename. For example, to output the poster, I chose TIF in the drop-down list, then entered a name like POST150.TIF.

This isn’t the only gremlin at home in the file export section. My first attempts at saving TIFFs produced tiny files with only a part of the image inside them. The answer turned out to be the default dimensions that appear in the dialog box where you specify the save option. They’re far too small, and you have to enter the correct measurement manually.

The TIFF was saved correctly when I clicked on the Cm radio button and entered an X dimension of 21 (A4 paper is 21cm wide). If you need to export a file at a resolution other than that specified when you created the CVS file, changing the options at this stage causes Satori to render it as required. The higher the resolution, the longer it takes and the bigger the file. Examples of TIFF files saved at 75dpi and 150dpi are to be found on the SUPERCD Satori file (POST75.TIF and POST150.TIF).