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7. The Menus / 7.8 The Effects Menu

### 7.8.58 3D Body

The function 3D Body displays a layer as 3D body. This works with all kinds of layers. The layer itself isn‘t changed and can still be edited normally.

The first line of the picture shows the source layer, the second line shows the same layers as 3D body. The source layers are a text layer, a simple vector layer and a group containing several vector layers.

If used with text layers, the 3D representation defines the text color for displaying the front and the back, the outline color controls the sides. If the text doesn‘t have an outline, the text color is used for the sides, too. With vector layers the fill color is used for front and back, the line color for the sides. If the line color is completely transparent, the fill color is used for the sides, too. With images the image defines the front and back, the sides are always gray.

In the corresponding dialog the on-switch is used to turn the 3D representation on and off. Depth controls the distance between front and back. The depth is given in percent relative to the size of the layer.

Perspectivic and Parallel are the kind of representation. Using Perspectivic parts farer away are smaller than the nearer ones, with Parallel there is no size reduction.

Light offers - aside from Soft Light, Normal Light and Hard Light - Mesh, too. With Mesh no surfaces are filled, instead they outlined.

Light controls the position of the light source. The percent value next to it is the strength of the light source. If Light Front and Back is turned off, the brightness of the front and of the back are not changed by the lighting. This is useful, if a gradient already simulating a reflection is used as color.

Rotation controls the position of the 3D body in space.

Finally some tips and hints for working with 3D bodies:

- It isn‘t easy to edit a layer in 3D representation. Therefore it is usually reasonable to turn it off temporarily by using the Layer Attributes dialog (see chapter 4.11).
- If the text edit tool is activated with a text layer in 3D representation, the normal text will be shown additionally in order to make editing easier. If this additional text is disturbing, just switch to another tool.
- A text layer as 3D body doesn‘t like a text layer anymore, but it still behaves like one. Therefore if you want to change the size of the 3D body, it is not sufficient to simply resize the layer with the layer tool, because that just changes the space available for text formatting. You will have to scale it by using the Special Scale mode (see chapter 6.2.1).
- Using vector layers you can create bodies with holes, too. To achieve this, the subpath defining the hole has to have a different direction then the outline path, otherwise you may get representation errors. If you see such an error, invert the direction by using the Vector Edit Tool (see chapter 6.4.1).
- Self-intersecting paths will create an incorrect 3D body. You should simplify these paths first.
- 3D bodies ignore layer styles, but distortions (see chapter 2.6) and path text (see chapter 6.2.11 and chapter 7.4.19) work fine.
- The Layer Tool (chapter 6.2.1) allows to edit 3D bodies. There are the following shortcuts::
- Alt+arrow up, Alt+arrow down: rotate around x-axis
- Alt+arrow left, Alt+arrow right: rotate around y-axis
- Alt+Shift+arrow left, Alt+Shift+arrow right: rotate around z-axis
- Alt+Shift+arrow up, Alt+Shift+arrow down: change depth
Holding additionally Ctrl (Windows) or Command (macOS) the value will be changed by a larger step.