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This is an interesting dingbat which looks too plain, as is. If you
just Blade Pro it, it makes a nice decoration, but its still sort of "light
weight". |

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Obtain a selection which is the outline of the above dingbat.
Methods for doing this differ and often vary with the dingbat, so no general rule can be
given. Feather this selection by a pixel or so to smooth things out when applying
Blade Pro. Save the selection to the alpha channel. Make sure that it is
filled with some color. |

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Open another image of the same size, and lay down the same dingbat, but
now use anti-aliasing. I used a black type on a white background. You may want
to try other things in order to get some more variation in the grey levels. I
haven't explored all of the options, yet. Save this image as a bitmap, and put it in
the environments and textures folder used by Blade Pro. |

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Now, apply the desired Blade Pro preset to the original selection, but use
the above bitmap for the texture (bump map). This takes some fiddling to get what
you want. You need to adjust both the size slider and position of the bitmap in
order to get things to overlay. If you don't have good control with your mouse or
pen and a lot of patience, don't even bother. <GGG> |

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Here is the result of my first attempt at this technique. I used the
basic gold preset, but with the bitmap generated above, rather than the blank. The
size was around 56 and I just had to slide it around to look right. I think the
texture level was about 30-40. I pulled back on the reflection level, and jacked up
the tarnish. I got good results using the "chrome" environment, as well. |
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