Hi all, I'm excited about fountain fills, and I hope you are too!

You may have noticed, there is a lot going on in CorelDRAW X7's new fountain fills (and Photo-Paint). Let's go through the features together:

It's easy to see what is going on here.  'Pad' is X6's fountain fill. 'Repeat and Mirror' repeats the fountain fill, flipping the gradient on every repeat.   'Repeat' simply repeats the gradient over and over again.

Below is how the 'Repeat and Mirror' looks on each of the fountain fill types:

Again, it's easy to see what is going on, except for... the conical.  That one looks exactly like X6, why?  Let's look a little closer at the different repeat modes on conical fountain fills:

In X6 and before, the conical fills essentially repeated once, and mirrored the result, so we've made the X6 version 'Repeat and Mirrored', and made 'Pad' a 360 degree conical fill, and 'Repeat' a 180 degree conical fill that is repeated once.  'Pad' conicals are great for fills that radiate from the center, but never repeat, like the holographic rays of a DVD or Blu-ray disk.  'Repeat' conicals are great for simulating anisotropic reflections, like brushed metal.

Next up, Acceleration:

Acceleration controls how the color blends between the stop points in the gradient.  When acceleration is zero, it behaves exactly like X6, a linear interpolation between the two colors.   Setting acceleration to -100 will create hard edges between each color without the need to place two gradient stops next to each other.  For me, -90 to -30 is where it gets interesting.  Using low negative numbers makes the fill look like it has hard edges with a Gaussian blur applied to it, I really like the effect.

Smooth blending is closely related to acceleration, it also controls how the colors blend together, but does so with some intelligence.

The curves on the right side show how turning on 'Smooth' will affect blending in each channel.  Take a look at the top black->white->black fountain fill, if you look near the center, you may notice what looks like a white line dividing the two halves.  If you think of the colors as representing height, the white transition point forms the top of a tent, a cusp, and our eyes see this.  Turning on 'Smooth' rounds out these transitions, making it look more pleasant.  

If you've played with meshes, this might look familiar; the mesh smoothing option uses the exact same algorithm.  You can even place a mesh beside a fountain fill to create joints that match up correctly.

How many times have you wanted to create elliptical fills?  With 'Free scale and skew', now you can.

Of course, this works with rectangular and conical fills as well.

We've also introduced transparency within fountain fills.  Each gradient stop has a transparency value that can be set.

You can even add a second transparency by using the transparency tool (or object properties docker) to create even more interesting effects.

Wacky!

There are also many improvements under the hood.  For example, elliptical fountain fills now start and end exactly where you place it.  The placement of the fills is also much more accurate.  You now can set the midpoint between every stop point.  You can also do clockwise and counter-clockwise blends between every stop point.

Let's take a look at some of the new UI.  The new on-screen UI controls make it easy to quickly edit your fill without ever leaving the view.

The new fill picker lets you save presets, browse through fills that others have created, choose favorites, vote on fills you like, and share your own fills with others (but only if you want to!),

To save a fill preset, select an object with the fill you like, and in either the fountain fill dialog (double click on the fill swatch in the status bar), or the fill tab in the object properties docker, click on the 'Save as New' button.  The following dialog will pop up:

Choose a name for the fill, and add a few tags that will help you find it (or others if you share the fill).  If you want to share the fill with the world, Check the 'Share this with the Content Exchange' and choose a category, otherwise uncheck it.  If you choose not to share the fill, it will only show up in the 'Personal' section of the fill picker.

If you decide not to share, you can easily share it later by selecting your preset in fill picker (under 'Personal') and clicking the share button.  You can also unshare fills later if you no longer like the fill, or have created a better version.

As for me, I've added a bunch, and I plan to share many more.  I've tagged most of them with 'Hendrik'.  If you want to check them out, click the 'Content Exchange' folder and type 'Hendrik' in the search bar.  For example, here are a few of my horizon fills that you can find in the 'nature' category.

To get your creative juices flowing, see how many of the following graphics you can create yourself, everything in this image was created using only fountain fills (and some fountain transparencies).

If anyone one wants a tutorial on any of the above graphics, post a comment, when I have time, I'll write one up.

I'm looking forward to seeing what new techniques you guys create using the new features in the fountain fills, and I do hope you share some of them, so that I can reuse them in my own stuff :)