Greetings all. My first XD image was pure luck. I have been playing with it all day and my images look like roadkill and white spots all over it. First I thought it was my computer screen and cleaned it. Quess what? It wasn't the screen. So what is causing all the spots?? Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Regards, Diane

Maybe the "density" value? Or the zoom? Just guessing - I got a quick bit of tutoring from joefraq last weekend and am certainly not an authority on the workings of XD. I'm still at the "what are all those tiny points of light flourescing on the screen" level, myself! lol Rick

Hi Rick, Your a riot!! Today I gave up on XD and moved on to APO. I am going to try to upload tonite tomorrow. Let me know what you think. There's no roadkill in APO. Regards, Diane

A good place to start is the File->Starter shapes and the "Quick Start" buttons (blue and green) on the File tab. As with Apophysis it is easy in XD to get fuzzy/noisy shapes (or even nothing but fuzz) and hard to get crispy shapes. XD seems a little trickier here of course, but is rather similar to Apo IMHO. Playing with the Starter shapes helps to give you a feel for it. There is another random button on the lower left of the Shape tab that will give you a random shape layout where the holons are all aligned nicely. Once you have an interesting shape you can play with the color tab (the randomize buttons are a good start) and finally the lighting tab. However to simplify you can always leave the color at white and apply color in the lighting stage. Very important: render at huge resolution (eg 3000x2000 or larger) and let the iterations get down below 300 - apply the lighting, save, and reduce it in PSP/Lview/PS and do your final PP. This is key in making nice solid/smooth looking shapes. Also, I found the standard Xenodream help file to be really useful.