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Tutorial: Using MS Word to design a cover

February 12th, 2009

Users often asked about changing texts on boxes or titles on books. The common answer is: Box Shot 3D is a rendering software. It doesn’t allow to edit images, it just “eats” your images and renders objects. After that I usually suggest to use Paint.Net – freeware Windows application that allows to do relatively complex things and it is hard to beat it because of its price.

But what if you don’t need complex things and just created a page in MS Word that should be used as a cover? That’s what this tutorial is about.

First of all, you need a Word document with one page. I created this one (I am going to win several design awards with it):

You need to adjust zoom level in Word to see the whole page. Then just press the Alt + Print Screen buttons to capture your image. Start Paint.Net and create a new document. Paint.Net will detect that you have image in Clipboard and use its size for the new document. After that paste your screenshot from clipboard to the new image. You will see something like this:

Now it is time to cut the rest of your image. Press the S key and Paint.Net will be switched to selection mode. Select your cover image like on the image below:

Then open Image menu and click Crop To Selection item. Paint.Net will leave what you selected and cut the rest. At this point you should see your cover and nothing more.

Save your image to JPEG or PNG to use it in Box Shot 3D. This is the simplest way to save a Word page to the image. It has its own pros and cons but it works. So far you have the front image for your book:

Now let’s start Box Shot 3D, select Hard Cover Book shape and load our image to the front side. Box Shot 3D was designed to work with “full-cover” images and it assumes that image contains front, left and back sides. So it tries to use a part of the image for the front cover. If you load your image, you will see the following:

To let Box Shot 3D know that your image is not a “full-cover” one, you need to press the Crop button (see the yellow label above). You will see a cropping editor that allows to select what part of image to use:

Adjust the cropping frame to select the whole image as shown above. Then press the Commit button. Cropping editor will disappear and you will see your image on the front side of the book. Press Fit Shape To Images to adjust the book size to your image. You will see something like this:

You may create a “full-cover” image in Word and import it the same way, but I just removed images from Side and Back sides and set their color to green, so the whole book became green.

Now the book is ready to rendering. Save the project, adjust camera, lighting and others and finally render your book.

That’s all

Your Comments:

1.	Pat Jones February 13th, 2009 at 1:21 am
	I am trying to follow your instructions. Can you please tell me what keys to press to load the image from paint need. I don’t see a load image button or anything that seems to load. Can you answer speedily. Thank you. Pat Jones
2.	Box Shot 3D  [+] February 13th, 2009 at 7:34 am
	In Paint.Net you should open File menu and click Save item. Then select PNG as the file type. In Box Shot 3D you should open Images tab, select the Front side and click a button with yellow folder – then point to the file you saved in Paint.Net.
3.	Melinda  [+] February 13th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
	I usually use Paint Shop Pro for images, but I think this may be easier if I have a lot of text! This tutorial opens up some interesting possibilities! A graphic designer I am not, and this will be a bit easier.

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