Introduction

allows to make good looking illustrations very quickly. The program contains manually drawn templates inside (software boxshots, discs, e-books covers, jewel cases and others). It embeds your artwork into the templates. Doing that, naturally repeats usual steps of a professional designer, who draws an illustration with a professional graphics software like Adobe Photoshop.

Each template has several faces named FRONT, SIDE, TOP and DISC. For example, a boxshot's template can have 2 or 3 faces depending of angle of view. You can assign a picture from file or solid colors to any face. You may also assign a picture or color to background.

supports transparent background. It makes possible to easily process and combine pictures in other image processing software like Adobe Photoshop.

How Does Quick 3D Cover Work?

Below is 's screen . There are some control areas marked by letters A-G.

Gallery of templates.

Scroll the gallery with scrollbar, click any template's icon with the left mouse button to select it. You will see new result in preview area instantly.

List of faces

Here you can load pictures for faces or assign them solid colors. Areas titled FRONT, SIDE, TOP, DISC, FRONT 2, SIDE 2 , TOP 2 and DISC 2 are to assign images or colors to corresponding faces. Background is to set picture or color to background. Fig. below shows where to click to load an image from file or set solid color.

Different templates contain different set of faces. Some templates contain more than one object. When you select a template, names of the faces used in the template are marked with red check marks, as shown on the Fig. above.

remembers, what you have selected last time: picture or color. If you select a file last time, it shows a template with picture from the file assigned to the face. If you want to switch from the file picture to solid color, simply click on the color area and select a color. Face will be colored by solid color. And vice versa, load a file, and the file will be used.

Input images can be Jpeg, Tiff, Bmp, Gif or Png. Doesn't matter what color depth and size in pixels the images have. accepts everything.

Output image dimensions

Set dimensions for the resulting picture here. If picture is larger than Preview Window, it will be shown reduced, but it will be saved with given dimensions. Maximum dimensions are 1000 x 1000 pixels.

Preview window

Preview window shows the result. It is updating automatically when you make any changes.

There is an information field under the Preview with text "Box [A4]. Proportions: 10 x 12 x 3". "Box" here is type of object, "A4" is template's name. "Proportions: 10 x 12 x 3" gives optimal proportions of source pictures for this templates as "width x height x depth".

So the box has width 10 units, height 12 units and depth 3 units. It helps to select a template which match your source pictures better, or make corresponding pictures for selected template. For instance, the picture with proportions 10 x 12 could be 500 x 600 pixels.

Practice shows that source pictures for faces usually don't need to have very exact proportions. The main criteria is good look of the final illustration. Just try to render some samples and select the best result. Batch render can help much in this case.

General controls

Flip horizontal. If checked, the resulting picture will be mirrored horizontally.

Transparent background. Check it if you want transparent background. In this case the final image will be saved with transparent background if you select format png. We recommend to use 24-bit png for output with transparency, because it gives a good result. 8-bit png and gif support only 1-bit transparency, which is not useful for halftone images in most cases. Jpeg and true-color bmp don't support transparency.

See also: description of Output Format Options dialog.

Shading controls

It is a group of parameters which control shading and highlights, reflections and the shadow, which object drops on the floor. By tuning these parameters your can improve quality of your pictures. You can leave the parameters intact, because their default values are rather good for many cases. However, in some cases default parameters would not ensure best results. Your own artwork can be light or dark, red or green, you may plan to use the illustrations on own colored background etc. In any case, it is easy to experiment to adjust parameters optimally for your artwork.

You can return all numerical parameters of shading to their default values by clicking the Default button on toolbar.

Object(s)

Object's color - some templates like open boxes or books have areas which must be filled with color. Here the color can be set.

Shading(%) - in fact, surfaces of objects in real life are not evenly lighted. It was taken into account in . Parameter Shading sets density of the darken areas in %. The less the parameter is, the lighter surfaces are. Small color button on the right sets color of the darkened areas.

Highlight(%) - as we've mentioned earlier, real life objects always reflects light from lamps, sun, other surfaces etc. The parameter defines degree of lightness of the light spots. Color of the highlights can be set here too.

Reflections

Show - if checked, reflections are visible.

Fade - if checked, gives smoothly faded reflections.

Opacity(%) - sets reflection's opacity. 100% gives absolutely opaque reflections. 0% makes reflections fully transparent, or invisible.

Length(%) - sets reflection's length in %. With 100% length, whole object's is reflected.

Brightness(%) - controls reflection's brightness. Range is -50 to 50%.

Blur reflections - it is from real life too. Say, a table's surface is not an ideal mirror, it is not absolutely smooth. In this case all objects reflected by the table surface will be blurred. Blur defines the degree of smoothness.

Shadow

Density of shadow(%) - defines the density of shadow from the object to an underlying surface.

Toolbar

New - Creates a new 's project.

Open -Opens a 's project.

Save -Saves your project.

Save as - offers to save project as a new file.

Pic. options - calls Output Format Options Dialog. You can set Jpeg quality and color depth for Bmp and Png (in the current version available options are True-color or 256-color, and Gif can be only 256-color).

Batch - calls dialog Batch Render Setup. With batch render you can make many pictures at once. Load pictures, adjust parameters and call batch render. It will render all selected templates and save the results.

Save pic. - saves picture.

Save pic. as - allows to save picture to different file.

Default - sets all numerical shading parameters to defaults.

Help - Opens the Help menu.

Batch Render

The dialog window can be opened from toolbar.

Filtering - check types of objects you need to render. Batch rendering will be done with all templates that contain checked objects.

Output folder - must contain a path to the folder where rendered files will be saved.

File name prefix - the prefix is some symbols added to the start of output file names. To get resulting output file name, adds name of template to the prefix. All the templates in the gallery are signed by letter and number: "A1", "G3" etc. So, for example, if you type "qwerty" for the prefix, files will be named as "qwerty_A1.jpg", "qwerty_A2.jpg" and so on.

File type - select a type of the file from the list.

File name sample - shows resulting filenames.

What to do with existing files? - if "Ask" is selected, will ask you what to do when it meet existing files. If "Overwrite" is selected, all existing files will be overwritten silently without questions.

Start - this button starts batch rendering.

Save - saves current parameters for future use and closes the dialog.

Batch render uses parameters as set in Output Format Options Dialog and makes background transparent if Transparent background is checked and output format is png.