Designing 360 Degrees

© 2000 by Foster D. Coburn III. All Rights Reserved.

A little while back I got a fax from a reader who wanted to know how to create a particular effect. While I can't answer questions like that immediately, I can certainly use it as the subject of this article. So if you have a particular task and can't figure it out, send it along and I'll try to show you how to do it in a future article.

Here's the basics of what we need to create. We need a circle with a 6 inch radius and we want marks around the edge of the circle at 1 degree increments that are labeled. The labels will have a 0 at the three o'clock position. Negative numbers will be listed above it (counter clockwise) and positive numbers will be below it (clockwise). If this sounds confusing, we'll straighten that out as we go along. The steps I provide should work in almost any version of CorelDRAW, though the exact name or menu used may be different. If in doubt, I'm going to use the CorelDRAW 9 layout for this exercise. You can follow along with each of the steps in Figure 1 shown below left.

Note: This Figure is saved in Flash format, so it is a vector and not a bitmap. You can right click to zoom in and out. Plus it should print at the highest possibly quality.

1. First we need to draw the circle. Since I need an exact size, I'm going to make sure that Snap to Grid is activated. Click and drag with the Ellipse tool while holding the Ctrl key to get a perfect circle. Watch the Status Bar (or the Property Bar in CorelDRAW 9) to see the current size. When it gets to 12 inches (twice the radius), release the mouse button first and then the Ctrl key.

To help maintain accuracy, I added one horizontal and one vertical guideline that intersect at the center of the circle.

2. Next, I need to draw the mark that will appear at the three o'clock position. I selected the Freehand tool, clicked once just inside the circle and then held down the Ctrl key and clicked a second time just outside the circle. This created a straight line that was perpendicular to the circle.
3. Just past the right end of the line, I typed the number zero. I changed the font size to 48 points since the circle is so big and I made sure to move it far enough away from the line to leave room for two digits and a negative sign.

Now we need to select both the line and the text. This will show the object handles surrounding both of them. Click on them a second time and you will see the rotation handles. In the center of the objects is a "thumbtack." It represents the center of rotation and we want to move it to the center of the circle.


4. Bring up the Transform roll-up (or Docker for CorelDRAW 9) shown in Figure 2 and enter five degrees for the amount of rotation and click the Apply to Duplicate button. Click it six more times to complete the effect desired by our reader.

You might remember that she wanted one degree increments instead of five. Hopefully you can see how easy it is to change one number and accomplish that. I've taken a bit of artistic license so we can have bigger (and readable) numbers.

5. The last step is the change the numbers so that they don't all read 0. This is just a matter of editing some text.

We've now accomplished what the reader required. But I'd like to take this one step further to make it a bit more artistic.

Variation on a Theme

Since I wasn't really told what it was I was drawing, I can only assume that it looks like some sort of controller or knob. Maybe these are markings that go just outside of the knob. Well, let's pretend that we're really designing a volume knob on the stereo (before they were just up and down buttons). We want to include numbers from 0 to 10 going counterclockwise. But more importantly, we want our knob to look three dimensional.

Since many of the steps are the same for these projects, I'm going to skip over several steps and get to the good stuff. Figure 3 shows all the steps so you can follow along below right.

1. Again, we drew a circle (only 2 inches this time) and added a mark. But this time we've put the mark inside of the circle. To the left of the mark we've added the number zero. Then we rotated and duplicated the mark and number by 15 degrees, but only counter clockwise this time. Lastly we changed the numbers so that 0 was at the bottom and 10 was at the top. You'll also notice that we filled the circle with a dark gradient fill and the numbers and marks with white.
2. Select all the numbers and marks. Move their center of rotation thumbtack to the center of the circle and rotate them (without duplicating) by 80 degrees. This gets all the numbers on the right side of the circle.

3. Now comes the time for the 3D part. For this, you'll need a utility program that works with CorelDRAW 7, 8 and 9. You can learn more about it and download a free evaluation version at http://www.unleash.com/ezmetrics. The EZ Metrics interface is shown at right. We want to select all the objects and click the leftmost L in the surface section of the EZ Metrics dialog.
4. Now all objects are shown in the isometric model. But we want 3D. So deselect everything except the ellipse itself. In the Extrude section of the dialog, enter .5 inches and click the upper right blue arrow. Poof! You've got a 3D knob.
5. The last step is not always necessary. But I then used the Interactive Extrude tool to add a .2 inch bevel to the edge of the knob. After doing this, I separated the Extrude Group and rotated the fountain fill in the bevel and the extrude so that they would stand out more.

In Closing

Now let's look back at what we've done. We created a circle, a straight line and a small piece of text. All very basic operations. In the first project, the only other step was rotating the text and the line with the center of rotation offset. The real key to this project was taking these basic steps and applying them in a slightly different order than normal. The second project was a bit more complicated with the Extrude and the use of the EZ Metrics utility. But it was still fairly simple and yet we ended up with an attractive volume knob. So until next time, turn up the volume!

Other Tutorials by Foster D. Coburn III

CorelDRAW X6 Font List · CorelDRAW X5 Font List · CorelDRAW X4 Font List · The Terms of Adobe Photoshop and Corel PHOTO-PAINT · CorelDRAW X3 Font List · Cropping and Rotating Files in Corel PHOTO-PAINT · The Magic of Color Styles · CorelDRAW's Find and Replace Wizard · Shorten Your Design Time with Templates · CorelDRAW's Multi-Faceted Eyedropper Tool · CorelDRAW and Special Characters · The Easy Way to Create Calendars in CorelDRAW · The Wide World of Labels in CorelDRAW · Including Variable Data with Print Merge · Resaving, Resizing & Resampling Files in Corel PHOTO-PAINT · Creating Your Own Fonts in CorelDRAW · The Evils of Using JPEG Files · Speeding Up CorelDRAW 11 and Windows XP · Symbols and Imposition · The Easiest Way to Recreate Logos · A Few Guidelines to Follow · Square Corners Can Be Sticky -- Rounding Corners in CorelDRAW · Creating Complex Shapes Easily with CorelDRAW · Identifying the Mystery Font · Two Ways to Create a Split Front Design · Last Word in Font Management · Calibrating Your Printed Colors with a Color Chart · Graphics Computing in 2001 · Hottest R.A.V.E. In Town · Get the Red Out of Eyes · Secrets of Color Management · Dressing Up Your PDF Files · How Adobe Acrobat Can Make Life Simpler · Why You Want PDF in Your Workflow · Converting a Scanned Logo to Vector in CorelDRAW · Designing 360 Degrees · Customizing Your Interface in CorelDRAW 8.0 · Fitting Text to a Path · Creating Cool Graphs Without a Spreadsheet · From CorelDRAW to Macromedia Flash, A Simple Example · Getting Rid of That Darned White Box · Converting a Bitmap Logo to Vector in CorelDRAW · Finding Clipart with ROMCAT

One User's Opinion Reviews

Xara Xtreme Pro 5.0
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