Visio 이미지화 2008/04/08 12:09

Visio 2007 Trick: 3-Point Gradient Fills with Transparency

A Question

How many shapes are required to draw the image below in Visio?

The Answer

5 shapes.

No groups, no wierd geometries. Just 5 shapes.

What I want

I want rich, smooth, multi-color gradient fills with independent transparencies for each color.

I could get what I want by drawing multiple shapes. That can work. But, sometimes it's irritating. The shapes have to be perfectly aligned, you'll have some selection wierdness, etc. Simpler to have 1 shape.

What is a 3-Point Gradient Fill with Transparency?

Before I show the steps. Let me give you a clearer understanding of what I mean.

First, here is a conceptual drawing the 3-point I really want to draw:

Now, without getting into the explanation, the gradient we'll be able to draw will be more like this:

So visualize it forming like this:

Implementing 3-Point Gradient Fill with Transparency

We are going to use a combination of the normal shape fills and the SHADOW feature to draw a 3-point gradient.

It's not perfect, it doesn't do everything you'd expect in an application like Illustrator, but I'm sure it's more than what you've seen with Visio so far.

Just so that the goal is clear: here is what we will end-up with:

ORANGE in the upper left
LIGHT BLUE in the upper-right
DARK BLUE in along the bottom

Steps

Launch Visio
Create a new document
Draw a rectangle

Select the rectangle, right-click, and choose Format / Fill...

The Fill dialog will appear

Set the colors appropriately (pay attention)
Set the Fill / Pattern to 36

Set Fill / Color and FIll / Pattern Color to the color you want for the upper left (ORANGE)

Don't touch the transparency for now
Set the Shadow / Pattern to 28

Set Shadow / Color to the color you want along the bottom of the shape (DARK BLUE)
Set Shadow / Pattern Color to the color you want at the upper right of the shape (LIGHT BLUE)
Click OK
Here is what you have now

Turn on the shape sheet via Tools / Options / Advanced / Run in developer mode and click OK to close the Tools / Options dialog

Select the shape, right click, and select Show ShapeSheet
Find the FIllBkgndTrans cell and change the value from 0% to 100%

You'll notice the change in the shape once you finish making this change

close the shapesheet window

A closer look

Select the shape
Form the menu, select Format / Shadow ...

The Shadow dialog launches

Under the Size & Position section, click the black dot in the middle of all the arrows

A close-up of the black dot to click

Once you click the dot, the Shadow dialog will look like this

NOTE: when you click on the black dot, the Shadow / Style changed to "13: Offset, custom" (this is expected)
Click OK to close the Shadow dialog
What we have created is a single shape with a three-point gradient.

If you edit the fill and shadow transparencies, you can vary the transparencies as needed

That was hard, how can I create another one?

Just duplicate the object and edit the colors in the Fill dialog to get what you want.

What about an existing shape? How can I copy the effect?

Use the format painter button

How do I create the picture are the beginning of the post?

Duplicate this shape 4 times for a total of five shapes.
Resize and stack three on top of each other and modify the colors via the FIll dialog.
Make the other two into vertical columns, set the colors and the transparencies
Play with the patterns and transparencies. You'll get some nice combinations!

Summary

A single shape that avoids selection weirdness and keep the file size manageable
An easy way to change the colors
Trivial to generate a different gradients, you only need to use the shapesheet the first time: Create this shape once, save it as a file, if you ever want another gradient just reload, duplicate, change colors via the UI as desired.

Visio-3-Point-Gradient-Example.vsd

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Visio 이미지화 2007/07/30 13:36

Visio Objects

Visio's Objects

Ralph Grabowski

Most often, you probably create a Visio drawing by dragging shapes onto the page, then connect them together. Visio also lets you draw with its set of drawing tools. Any time you draw in Visio, you use one of four basic objects: line, arc, elliptical arc, and spline.

The 'Fundamental Four' objects

You can call these the "Fundamental Four." Every object you see in Visio, from the simplest line to the most complex shape and intelligent connector, is based on these four.

I lied: all objects are actually based on three fundamental objects. It turns out the arc object is almost never used in Visio, because the arc is rather limited. Attempting to stretch an arc results in unexpected clover and hourglass shapes. The elliptical arc is more adaptable, since it stretches predictably and can mimic circular arcs. So, whenever Visio's printed and on-line documentation speaks of "arcs," it really means elliptical arcs.

"But what about text?," you protest. "And the rectangle and the ellipse?" Looking at the icons on the Standard toolbar, there seems to be tools for drawing eight different kinds of objects: text, connector, pencil, curves, line, arc, rectangle, and ellipse.

The truth is that tool bar is a facade. Come with me as we uncover the masquerade and see what is really happening -- behind the scenes -- when you click an icon and draw with its tool:

Text Tool creates a text block within an invisible rectangle made of four lines. "Text block" is the term Visio gives to the text that you can write on top of every shape.
Connector Tool creates lines with specialized properties at either end.
Pencil Tool creates lines or elliptical arcs, depending on how the cursor moves.
Freeform Tool draws a spline. Technically, the spline is a NUBS (short for non-uniform B-spline). NUBS should not be confused with the NURBS (short for non-uniform rational B-spline) found in computer-aided design software and other drawing programs. In NURBS, all weights are equal; in NUBS, weights can be unequal. By the way, the "B" in NUBS and NURBS refers to Carl de Boor's B-splines and not Bezier, as commonly held.
Line Tool draws a line. Hold down the Shift key to constrain the line to 45-degree angles.
Arc Tool draws a 90-degree elliptical arc (one quarter of an ellipse). It would be more accurate to call this tool the "Elliptical Arc" tool. Unlike the other tools, holding down the Shift key does not draw a circular arc.
Rectangle Tool draws a rectangle out of four lines. Hold down the Shift key to draw a square, also made of four lines.
Ellipse Tool draws an ellipse out of two elliptical arcs. Hold down the Shift key to draw a circle, also made from two elliptical arcs.

In summary, four -- three, really -- objects are used by Visio to create all shapes. Three of the tools draw native objects; the other five tools on the toolbar draw derivative objects.

The Secret Revealed

You may be wondering, "How it is possible to draw a line with the Line Tool, and then create something that acts differently when drawing a line with the Connector Tool?" Even if you weren't wondering, here is the one-word answer: ShapeSheet.

When I invited you to come with me behind the facade, I was making a veiled reference to the ShapeSheet. I won't go into much detail here, except to say that it is the ShapeSheet that determines whether a line object acts like a line or like a smart connector. It is the ShapeSheet that makes four line objects look like a solid rectangle. It is the ShapeSheet that makes two elliptical arc objects look like a round circle.

Each shape owes its existence to the ShapeSheet. The ShapeSheet tells you everything you need to know about the shape. There are, however, a couple of exceptions. The most notable exception is that you cannot access the text block from the ShapeSheet (you can by automation); this shortcoming may be corrected in a future version of Visio.

Other Objects

Earlier, I said I lied about the Fundamental Four, that only three objects are used to create every shape in every drawing in Visio. I kinda lied again. There are three more fundamental objects found in Visio. These are, however, not meant for drawing.

Guideline, guide point, page and image objects.

The guide line and guide point objects help you position shapes in the drawing. They are like construction lines in computer-aided design software. You see guides in the drawing, but they are not printed by your printer.
The page object is what you draw on, although you can draw off the edges of the page, too. A drawing can contain up to 200 pages. The practical limit is one or two thousand objects in a single drawing; beyond that, Visio is too slow to work with efficiently. The page is not printed, either, but contains visual aids, such as the drawing scale, the layer structure, the grid, and the snap.
The image object is the result of using the Insert > Picture and Insert > Object commands to insert a file or an object created by another program. Image objects can be printed, but often cannot be edited.

Like the Fundamental Four, these additional objects have ShapeSheets that control their behavior.

Future Objects

Visio has indicated that the next version of the Visio software will have more fundamental objects. These could be: circle, point, polyline, and NURBS curve.

My guess is that a native circle would help reduce the overhead of calculating the position of two elliptical arcs. The point object would be like a line with no length.

The polyline might be a connected series of lines; if defined like AutoCAD's polyline, then it would include arcs, splines, and variable width. The NURBS curve is the equally-weighted version of the NUBS curve, as discussed earlier.

--> 위의 글은 Visio 5.0버전에서 정리된 글로 Visio 2007 버전은 Future Objects가 이미 반영되어 있답니다. ^^

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